Editorial cartoonist talks about getting canned

Self-portrait

I interned at the Ventura County Star during my last quarter of college and for a few months after I graduated. My earliest mentors worked at the Star and a few of my friends remain. So when I heard two weeks ago that the once safe paper was laying off 17 newsroom employees, I worried about who would get axed. I was shocked by one casualty: my very, very distant cousin Steve Greenberg.

Steve was the paper’s editorial cartoonist, in fact the sole remaining member of its graphics department, and quite possibly the newsroom’s lone remaining Jew—anti-Semites. It was hard to believe that such a valued member of the staff could be let go. And what would Steve do now to pay his mortgage? Steve is roughly my parents’ age—hardly time for a career change—and cartoonists jobs have grown incredibly rare. Steve still sketches one political cartoon a week for The Jewish Journal, but you can be sure that won’t support much more than dinner with the wife.

“Sorry to hear the news, Steve,” I wrote in an e-mail right after learning the Star’s brass thought he was expendable. “What a bunch of idiots.”

He responded that he was “shell-shocked.” The rest of that exchange was private, but the Comic Riffs blog at Washingpost.com recently spoke with Steve about the career cataclysm. The interview and a cartoon Steve drew when the incredibly unpopular Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, resigned are after the jump: