Pen-and-ink prophet: after five decades, cartoonist Paul Conrad still denounces injustice, smugness and deception wherever he finds it - Nation - Interview

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 26, 2001 by Arthur Jones

Tall, rangy, voice booming, Paul Conrad is on the altar at St. John Fisher Church. He's not a priest or liturgical minister, but a sculptor -- and a three time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist. His scalpel-sharp pen has gleefully or disgustedly dissected the pomposities of American presidents and public figures for five decades. And his compassion has caught the nation's mood in moments of tragedy.

Right now he's tugging at drapes to help the photographer ensure there's sufficient light to make a picture of his "Risen Christ." It is a metal corpus situated ahead of the cross behind it and lit so the cross and corpus are repeated in triplicate as shadows.

The topic being discussed on the busy altar is not art or cartooning but the declaration of a 19th-century Anglican cleric. That cleric contended that God wanted to be witnessed to, not praised, because "no gentleman likes to be praised to his face."

"Damn right," said the 77-year-old Conrad. "Remove the words of praise and a good editor could cut some prayers and hymns by 50 percent." Meanwhile, suffering in silent prayer at the rear of the church, were two men praying in the screened-off chapel where the Blessed Sacrament was exposed.

Apologies were made, and the conversation upfront continued in booming whispers as the photographer did her work.

Conrad is not out of place on an altar -- his admirers see him as an Old Testament prophet. He denounces injustice, smugness and deception. He trounces his political enemies simply by removing their outer shells in full view of the public. But Conrad never flounces off -- he stays to face the uproar, the rancor and the occasional libel suits he creates.

"If Jeremiah had drawn, he would have drawn like Conrad," writes cartoonist Doug Marlette, introducing a newly published selection of Conrad cartoons that date back to the 1970s. "Conrad is Isaiah with a Newton and Windsor brush. Amos with a Speedball pen."

Though Conrad is now semi-retired from the Los Angeles Times, the paper still regularly carries his work. His output of four cartoons a week is syndicated. His cartoons done in the wake of the Sept. 11 attack on New York and Washington reveal his nib has lost none of its edge, nor its capacity for empathy. (His "Band of Brothers" drawing of firemen at the World Trade Center has been picked up by fire departments nationwide as a symbol for T-shirts and caps.)

What shapes a pen-and-ink prophet?

Conrad, a Des Moines, Iowa-born and -reared cradle Catholic, realized his girls in the boys' bathroom at St. Augustine's elementary school.

"Some of the older boys went in for what was later called graffiti," said Conrad, "and when I was about 8, I Illustrated someone else's restroom wall editorial comment. As a result, I learned that one picture is worth a thousand words, and that when the establishment gets mad, it goes after the cartoonist, not the editorial writers."

He'd also learned he could draw better cartoons than any other kid in St. Augustine's.

Of his Catholicism he says that his church, his faith, "has given me a base -- but I can't say that I think that much of the base at this point. There's a number of things I can't go along with. Sitting on the priests and not letting them marry. Treating the nuns like chattel. Worrying too much about baptizing the wrong people, especially babies. Dumbest thing I ever heard. I just don't understand that. This is the type of church Christ had in mind?

"Deep down I'm still a Catholic," he said. When the deadline for his cartoon approaches and it's a day when his ideas are few, he lowers his head and says a "Hail Mary," and when he lifts it back up, the idea is there.

"Never fails," he said.

Nonetheless, Conrad remains contrarian.

"When I did that crucifix" -- one of two sculptures he's done for St. John Fisher Church -- "the only thing I said was I wasn't going to have Christ on the cross. Seemed to me silly. Here's people worshiping and they've got a Christ up there deader than hell. This Christ is off the cross - thank God," said Conrad. "That way the sculpture points out the possibilities. He's risen."

Conrad has built a career of pointing out the possibilities.

After he and his twin brother, Jim ("I'm the sweet-tempered one," said Conrad), graduated from Roosevelt High School, Conrad went to Valdez, Alaska, on a construction job. The Depression hadn't ebbed, and employment was not abundant.

"There was only one piano in Valdez," said Conrad, at Big Red's whorehouse, so that's where I went to play it." Among his talents, he is an accomplished musician.

But frontier life wasn't for him. Eight months later he was back in the lower 48, drafted into .the Army Corps of Engineers and sent to the South Pacific. "I went through basic training three times until I finally got it right," he said.

Said his wife, Kay, "people sometimes criticize Con for his military cartoons. They say, `You so-and-so, you were never in the military.' He was. He was in the invasions of Guam and Okinawa. Trouble is he's a bleeding-heart patriot," she said, whose critics sometimes confuse his attacks on military jingoism with an attack on the military.