After 42 years and 10,000 cartoons, Steve Sack didn't retire from the Star Tribune in 2022 because he ran out of passion or ammunition for editorial cartooning. At 68, his Pulitzer Prize-winning right hand had failed him—carpal tunnel, nerve damage, surgery.
"My hand started to get numb, the numbness moved all the way up my arm, and, almost overnight, I couldn't hold a pencil anymore," Sack says. "I didn't have a choice. Most cartoonists die at their desks, but I felt like I'd had a full career."
Retirement would last just over three years. Last October, compelled to comment on "all the shit that's going down," Sack roared back via Substack with an almost wholesome mocking of President Trump's fixation on the Nobel Peace Prize. Subsequent skewerings proved harsher, like Trump's bathtub tariff tantrum and the weight of the Epstein files literally crushing him.
Then came Operation Metro Surge, which unleashed the Trump administration's frankly, well, cartoonish levels of cruelty and ineptitude on Sack's Twin Cities neighbors. The veteran doodler put DHS in his crosshairs and issued a downright moving cartoon on Minnesota solidarity powering a boot straight into ICE's ass.
None of these new Sack illos came easy—remember that bum drawing hand?
"About six months ago I started going to a life-drawing session every week—I was trying to see if I could do anything with my left hand," he says. "I hadn't tried drawing for three-and-a-half years. It started to feel more controlled, nothing like with my right hand, but enough to make it enjoyable."
Sack says he didn't have any plans to jumpstart his career, but…
"Then this whole ICE thing started up, and I just got so fucking pissed off about it."
These days the process takes three times longer than before, he notes, adding that the toons are only possible because his iPad sketching program can zoom in for detailed brush strokes. (In the past his right hand performed those fine-motor movements non-digitally.)
Rebuilt with technology—perhaps better and stronger, though not faster—bionic Sack needed a platform. The lifelong newspaperman found a digital one at the most recent cartoonist convention, which he initially attended as a "farewell to [his] buddies," figuring it'd be his last.
Sack popped in for a panel on Substack that was hosted by several cartoonists who'd lost their old jobs, and he learned that some of them, like Kevin Kallaugher and Jack Ohman, were meeting or exceeding their old incomes by publishing on the newsletter site.
Last fall The Art of Sack was born. Sack's new publishing model will sound familiar to Racket members. For $8 per month or $80 per year, paid subscribers get exclusive cartoons, commenting privileges, and, crucially, artist-designed Trump whoopee cushions and commemorative coins. All 1,500+ subscribers receive fresh cartoons in their inboxes every Tuesday and Thursday.
Sack is seizing on this newish medium to keep an old and dying tradition afloat. At the beginning of the 20th century, U.S. newspapers employed around 2,000 editorial cartoonists, according to the Herblock Foundation. That number has plummeted to about 30 today. Gannett, the country's largest newspaper publisher, slashed away opinion pages at its 250ish properties in 2022, another blow to the field of political cartooning.
"People have gotten so damn squeamish about offending anybody these days, and management is so worried about losing any readers at all," Sack observes, adding that he experienced almost zero editorial interference at the Star Tribune. "They'd rather not have a cartoonist, or run cartoons that are basically pablum."
The Strib did keep its editorial cartoonist position after Sack retired four years ago. It didn't last long. Sack's replacement, Mike Thompson, got off to a choppy start in early 2023, with rookie CEO/publisher Steve Grove apologizing for a debut cartoon that drew charges of Islamophobia. The newspaper eliminated its cartoonist gig that October. (At the time, Sack called his successor a "very good cartoonist" and the decision to remove him "terrible.")
How's life over on Substack for a septuagenarian cartoonist? "I'm enjoying it, I love drawing," Sack says. This reporter buttered his bread, guessing out loud that it must be going gangbusters. After all, Steve Sack is a goddamn Minnesota institution!
"Well," he says with the gentle, unassuming voice of a lifelong illustrator, "I'm always surprised by that kind of talk because I feel like I'm a mean person… or try to be to people I don't like."
Panel-by-panel, never stop giving 'em hell, Steve.
