Mike Beckom Retires
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Editorial cartoonist Mike Beckom has told The Daily Cartoonist he will be retiring at year’s end:
I began this journey over 22 years ago as a way to honor my Dad after he died. He’d taught me to draw when I was 4-5 and always encouraged me to ‘do something with my talents’. Gathering my courage and a handful of poorly drawn toons, I ventured to my local paper to do just that. After some initial clumsy presentations and rejections, I got the hang of it and decided that ‘self-syndication’ was the way to go. I’d sell my toons to lots of local papers at a reduced price. It worked, and during the first part of my ‘career’, I sold to just about every newspaper and several magazines across my home state of South Carolina. I branched out to neighboring states (Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina) and even into other states north and west of here. The crowning achievement for me was landing a spot with Counterpoint Media Syndication. (Thanks, Nick Anderson and Amy Lago, for taking a chance on me).
Alas, all good things must come to an end, and so it is with my toons. Multiple injuries when I was younger, surgeries, and arthritis have taken their toll on my drawing hand to the point where I can no longer draw straight lines. Getting old is NOT for sissies. I’ve compensated for the last couple of years by doing an ‘image trace’ in Adobe Illustrator, which gives me some measure of clean line art. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze anymore. My sweet wife, Angie, who has been my biggest cheerleader, deserves more of my time. Time that I’ve devoted to drawing toons… and I intend to give it to her. Y’all pray for me that she doesn’t use this newfound time to decide that she would rather beat me to death in my sleep and dispose of the body as they do on her crime dramas that she’s so fond of watching.
As Mike mentioned above he began his cartooning career in 2003 after his father had died in the Spring of that year. A 2009 profile in Mike’s hometown paper, The (Greenwood) Index-Journal, notes that for decades he was in production ending up as a Fujifilm manager. In 2003 he began freelancing to local papers. The Abbeville Press and Banner was the first to publish Beckom’s cartoons. Soon he was self-syndicated to 30 newspapers extending reach beyond his immediate neighbors and beyond local politics.
Mike would also use his talents for more than editorial cartoons, branching into sports.
Between Fujifilm and teaching at Piedmont Technical College Mike would continue his cartooning sidegig winning local cartoon awards and appearing in The Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year book collections.
Unapologetically conservative Mike told The Daily Cartoonist:
I guess that making folks on the left mad – has always been sort of my goal. I said that it amused me because I always found it entertaining that the side that preaches ‘acceptance’ of anything and everything, consists of some of the least accepting folks in the country. My ‘job’ as an inkslinger/political cartoonist, as I see it, has been to make folks think, to make them talk about issues, and to somehow entertain with what very limited humor skills I might inject. I read another Inkslinger’s thoughts on political cartooning (I think it was Dick Locher, but I could be wrong) who said (I’m paraphrasing here) that we are not journalists or reporters. We don’t go where reporters go to dig into a story. We very nonchalantly stand on the hillside while the battle rages below, and after the shooting stops, we stroll down the hill and shoot the wounded. I like that. Clear, concise, to the point. Pick a side and wipe out the other side.
In 2022 Beckom gave up his self-syndicating ways and joined Counterpoint Media, and when the Counterpoint fellowship went to Tribune Content Agency earlier this year he was part of that relocation. Mike’s cartoons from the past few years can be read at GoComics.
Mike Beckom was kind enough to supply The Daily Cartoonist with an exclusive early look at his final cartoon:
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