Matt Wuerker

"For people who want to question whether America has a racist history, just go back and look at the political cartoons. The history is horrible."

"The self-righteously bitter cartoons that appear in sectarian magazines are fine if all you want to do is preach to the choir, but I believe you can reach a lot more people with humor."

"Globalization is part of modern reality. How you define it is where the conflict is. Some of us think that its civilized to provide people with water by putting up public drinking fountains. Other people think that drinking fountains need to be eliminated so as not to undercut the market for $2.00 bottled water."

"I was lucky as a kid to get to meet Paul Conrad who lived in my hometown. He is a giant in editorial cartooning, winner of three Pulitzers and even more impressively he won a place on Nixon‘s enemies list. He was a huge influence. Starting out I also spent a lot of time looking at Ron Cobb, an insane crosshatcher who drew for the alternative press in the ’60’s, as well as David Levine, Ed Sorel, and R. Crumb. I also love Steinberg‘s visual elegance and innately whimsical voice. Red Grooms is another guy who took cartooning wonderful places. There are also a number of 19th-century cartoonists whose mad drawing skills and ability to create rich visual worlds always impressed me. A.B. Frost, T.S. Sullivant, Joseph Keppler are often overshadowed by Nast, but in many ways they were more adventurous graphically. Geez, maybe I am an anachronism. I also want to throw in here how great it is to work in D.C. There’s a great circle of cartoonists here and being in their orbit is a daily inspiration. Opening the Post to Toles and Richard Thompson (Richard’s Poor Almanac is the best and most original cartoon in the country and sadly known mostly only to those lucky enough to be in range of the Post;, Cul de Sac is pretty good too). And then there’s Ann Telnaes’ animations that appear in the Post online—-truly inspired and the wave of the future, as well as Beeler, Galifianakis, Bill Brown, and others. It raises one’s game to be around all these folks."

"Funny Times is the best little cartoon monthly out there"

"The thing I like most about political cartooning is the relevance of the work to the real world. And if you do this long enough you get to look back and see yourself in historical context, sometimes on the right side and sometimes on the wrong. But I’m proud of the work I was doing in the runup that bamboozled us into the Iraq War and that horrible chapter where Cheney and Bush drove the country into the ditch, the one we’re still in."