Mike Luckovich has won two Pulitzer Prizes, but before he was an award-winning editorial cartoonist, he sold insurance door-to-door.
On a special Memorial Day episode, Luckovich sat down with “Politically Georgia” host Bill Nigut to discuss his long career.
He said he began drawing cartoons at a young age to make friends as his family moved around often. “So even as a kid in elementary school, I was into cartooning,” he said, “and I wanted to be a cartoonist for Mad magazine.”
“I was in fifth grade or something when we first moved to Boise, and the first thing I did is I drew a caricature of the teacher,” Luckovich said. “(I) drew the teacher, and then I just handed it to the kid next to me, and that kid passed it to the next kid, and pretty soon I had 30 new friends.”
But moving past elementary school and into adulthood, Luckovich’s career success didn’t start overnight. “I sold life insurance for a couple of years because I couldn’t get a job as a cartoonist,” he said. “And so for a long time there, I didn’t think I was ever going to be a cartoonist, and then it happened.”
He joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution staff in 1989 and went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes, the first in 1995 and the second in 2006.
When it comes to the longevity of his career and thinking of new ideas for cartoons, he said, “There are certain weeks where there’s just not a lot of news, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh My God.’ ”
“And so I am just like, I’m panicked. But I think in the last five years, there’s been one time I missed my deadline,” he said. “But I’m always worried that it’s going to happen again, and so it’s just part of the job, and it just makes me work harder.”
Luckovich said his ultimate goal over his four decades at the AJC has been to “come up with something that shows people what’s actually happening or helps people in some way, stands up for people who don’t have much of a voice.”
Tuesday on “Politically Georgia”: The team reviews top political headlines from over the weekend.
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