Pete Wagner - Cartooning Career

Cartooning Career

Wagner was influenced by Sanders to work in an acerbic "sledgehammer" style of political cartooning, which was considered "too in-your-face" by most commercial, corporate daily newspapers (to quote an editor at one suburban Chicago paper). Determined to remain true to what Wagner considered the highest and best practice of the art form, rather than "selling out" by watering down his satire or drawing style, Wagner, inspired by the examples of Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau and I.F. Stone, forsook a career which by the time he was 20 years old held significant promise of wealth and fame to instead work for smaller but more journalistically fiesty or risque alternative and college papers and magazines and to engage in radical political and cultural activism. Characterized by Isthmus as a "punk cartoonist" in a cover story about Wagner published in March 1978, Wagner's political cartoons were syndicated by the College Press Service from 1973 to 1976, and reprinted in over 300 periodicals, including Time magazine, the Washington Post, The Progressive, In These Times, High Times and others. In 1977, Wagner was recruited by Larry Flynt to draw political cartoons on a regular basis for Hustler magazine, under the banner "Drawing Fire, by Pete Wagner." Wagner quit less than a year later when Flynt announced that Hustler would be transformed from a pornographic magazine into a Christian publication, explaining that he did not want to "ruin my reputation by being associated with a religious magazine." Wagner's cartoons won a national Society of Professional Journalists award in 1976 for a cartoon drawn while at the Minnesota Daily, six more SPJ awards between 1985 and 1991 for cartoons drawn while at City Pages, an honorable mention in the John Fischetti competition and several Minnesota Newspaper Association awards, also while at City Pages. One of his cartoons was shown in an exhibit at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York.