Tim Eagan – RIP
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Editorial and alternative cartoonist Tim Eagan has passed away.
Timothy Charles (Tim) Eagan
May 31st, 1944 – August 25th, 2025
…The Government major carried him to Hastings College of the Law and to a brief career of practicing law, most notably as a Deputy District Attorney in and around San Jose, California. But he was never fully comfortable on that life path. A series of large life decisions soon led him to find success as a cartoonist, speaker, writer, and briefly as a politician.
His editorial cartoons, notably Deep Cover, reflected a life-long fascination with politics, and opened the door to both local and national notoriety. His long- running comic strip Subconscious Comics, conversely, showed a similar preoccupation with fantasy and the sometimes strange environments found in human nature.
Tim Eagan is the illustrator behind Subconscious Comics and Deep Cover. In the 1970s he published the Santa Cruz Independent, a local alternative news publication, and ran for District Attorney of Santa Cruz County. His cartoons have appeared locally [link added] in the Santa Cruz Times, Sundaz, Good Times, the Santa Cruz Independent, the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian, the Phoenix, the Santa Cruz Express, The Sun, the Santa Cruz Comic News, and the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
As far as I can suss out Subconscious Comics ran from 1981 to 2000.
From Tim’s Andrews McMeel profile who had syndicated his Deep Cover for awhile some 20 years ago:
Tim Eagan has been cartooning politics for thirty years. His work was first seen in Santa Cruz, California in the form of single-panel editorial cartoons. His outlets were mostly alternative weeklies until the San Francisco Examiner began to use his work.
In 1994, the Examiner invited Eagan to create a political comic strip as a regular feature for the paper. That was the beginning of Deep Cover. Deep Cover runs in a variety of weeklies and dailies nationwide and is featured in the recently-published “Attitude: The New Subversive Political Cartoonists.” [link added to the Tim Eagan interview]
The Deep Cover political comic strip ran from 1994 to around 2019.
I remember enjoying Tim’s creativity in The San Francisco Examiner on occasion in the mid to late 1990s. And as a favorite in the early 2000s on the GoComics site.
From 2022 is this Lookout Santa Cruz article by Wallace Baine about Tim’s Graphic novel Head First:
A few years ago, he gave up doing his political cartoons. “I got tired of doing it,” he said. “I think I lost faith in my fellow man. You get in your 70s, and you start reassessing your whole philosophy.”
It was then he decided to create a graphic novel and publish it on his own terms: “It’s the biggest single project I’ve ever undertaken as a cartoonist.”
September 26 Update – at the Santa Cruz Sentinel Stephen Kessler remembers Tim Eagan:
Witty, pointed, politically astute, psychologically insightful, constantly present through the 1970s and ’80s in every underground and alternative Santa Cruz newspaper of those years, Tim Eagan’s cartoons and comic strips are among the most indelible markers of local cultural history. Tim died last month at the age of 81. I had the privilege to be his colleague as an ink-stained toiler in the vineyards of this antique medium and I remember him as a redheaded and red-bearded reality-checker of all things worthy of ridicule, himself included.
From his four-panel strip “Stringer” in Sundaze through the more explicitly political “Deep Cover” in the Independent to the incomparable “Subconscious Comics” in the Express and The Sun, Tim’s prodigious production, fertile imagination and skilled hand with a pen was so ubiquitous that, at the time, I was scarcely aware of how extraordinary an artist he was; his work was just part of the local landscape, as unique as the architectural profile of the Boardwalk.
When we founded The Sun in 1986 after the demise of the Express, Tim was one of the key players on our team — a voice of reason on the editorial board, consummate editorial cartoonist and, in the paper’s back pages with the classified ads, creator of “Subconscious Comics.” …
Bratton Online, a Santa Cruz-centric news-history-opinion site ran Tim’s Deep Cover as part of their weekly posts from it’s online beginning in 2010. When Tim retired the strip in July 2019 Bratton Online continued running the comic with reruns. In late 2018 they added Tim’s Subconscious Comics rerun to run simultaneously with Deep Cover. The Bratton Online archive links are available as at the site’s sidebar.
Tim Eagan’s website is available through the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine.
From 2009 is Daryl Cagle’s five minute interview with Tim.
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