New Administration Policies Forced Steve Sack’s Hand
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Back in the Spring of 2022 editorial cartoonist Steve Sack retired due to a medical condition.
After 42 years and 10,000 cartoons, Steve Sack didn’t retire from the Star Tribune in 2022 because he ran out of passion or ammunition for editorial cartooning. At 68, his Pulitzer Prize-winning right hand had failed him—carpal tunnel, nerve damage, surgery.
“My hand started to get numb, the numbness moved all the way up my arm, and, almost overnight, I couldn’t hold a pencil anymore,” Sack says.
Then late last year Sack returned to editooning. As Jay Boller at Racket explains:
Last October, compelled to comment on “all the shit that’s going down,” Sack roared back via Substack with an almost wholesome mocking of President Trump’s fixation on the Nobel Peace Prize. Subsequent skewerings proved harsher, like Trump’s bathtub tariff tantrum and the weight of the Epstein files literally crushing him.
Then came Operation Metro Surge, which unleashed the Trump administration’s frankly, well, cartoonish levels of cruelty and ineptitude on Sack’s Twin Cities neighbors.
None of these new Sack illos came easy—remember that bum drawing hand?
“About six months ago I started going to a life-drawing session every week—I was trying to see if I could do anything with my left hand,” he says. “I hadn’t tried drawing for three-and-a-half years. It started to feel more controlled, nothing like with my right hand, but enough to make it enjoyable.”
These days the process takes three times longer than before, he notes, adding that the toons are only possible because his iPad sketching program can zoom in for detailed brush strokes. (In the past his right hand performed those fine-motor movements non-digitally.)
Rebuilt with technology—perhaps better and stronger, though not faster—bionic Sack needed a platform…
Read the full article/interview here.
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