My Morgue

Like most cartoonists and illustrators whose work pre-dates Google, I have large file drawers in my studio devoted to what has traditionally been called a "morgue." A morgue is a file of visual reference material an artist can rely on when called upon to draw, say, an avocado, an armadillo or the Spanish Armada. It is stuffed with photographs culled from magazines over the years, illustrations from medical books, maps, anatomical studies, photos of team uniforms... anything that will make it easier when I get a cartoon idea that requires me to draw unfamiliar imagery.

My college drawing professor, Marty Garhart, used to refer to building up our "visual vocabulary," the ease with which we are able to draw objects more or less committed to memory and without reference material. Before any of us could call up twenty thousand photos of a horse's rear end on Google Image Search, I needed to be able to pull off a reasonable facsimile using just my knowledge of horses, and maybe a photo or two I'd socked away in my morgue.

So I was the guy at Kenyon College in the early 'Seventies fishing through the trash barrels in the dorm hallways for Times and Newsweeks in order to cut out the photos and file them in my morgue. I'd built a good twenty-pounder by the time I started here at the Enquirer in 1976, and now that I haven't had to move it for three decades, it has grown to two bulging file cabinets.

Along the way, I began filing hard copies of each day's editorial cartoon usually according to topic, key images and the people caricatured in them. It's an amazingly inefficient system. To find cartoons I've done of Jeanne Schmidt I have to thumb through Stalin, Shamir, Seinfeld, Springsteen and Santa Claus. There is no order beyond the first letter, but who has time to go back and organize?

The good part is that, like most cartoonists and illustrators, I do have a remarkable memory for my own work and can usually picture quickly a cartoon someone says I drew in 1982, for example. If I can see Ronald Reagan trimming the budget of the Department of Health and Human Services, I can look for it in any number of ways. And there it is, under C for chainsaw.

This all comes up because earlier this week I was looking up an old cartoon I'd done on oil dependency, sparked by Bush's recent discovery of the hybrid car and switch grass. In the O file I came upon cartoon after cartoon I'd drawn over three decades on America's oil dependency, each one documenting the national vow to end our reliance. The first was in 1976 and thirty years later our presidents are still using the same rhetoric while dependency grows and grows.

I presented the handful of cartoons to my buddy Bruce back here in the editorial page department, thinking he might find use for one or two as illustrations for columns on the same subject. Instead, he talked with Dave Wells, our editor, who saw in this a Forum cover. It'll run this Sunday.