Vermont cartoonist and writer Jeff Danziger has been scoffing at the powerful and skewering politicians for half a century. His cartoons have been syndicated in newspapers around the world, and he’s been nominated twice for a Pulitzer Prize.
He still draws every day using a blue pencil and churns out about 300 cartoons a year, including his weekly comic strip The Teeds, about everyday life in Vermont.
While he still has a studio in New York City, he spends most of his time at his farmhouse in Dummerston. His Vermont studio is up a flight of spiral stairs. It's small, almost spartan. There’s no tchotchkes and few if any personal photos.
"I have two art tables here because I switch back and forth, and I sit here for the political cartoons and can watch TV," Danziger says, taking a seat and leaning back.
Large, rectangular lights hang over his workspace, which is filled with high-tech equipment. "With the computer tools, you don’t need that much space; you don’t need to lay the drawings out 'cause they’re all in the machine," he explains.
He points to what looks like an oversized computer monitor and starts tapping on its keyboard. "It looks like a computer monitor but it’s a good deal more than that," Danziger says. "For example, if you bring up a cartoon here, I can bring it up in black and white and then color it here, and you can change sizes and all those miraculous computer tools.”
Danziger publishes his own work these days on his website, Jeffdanziger.com, as well as on Substack and Vimeo . He's also still syndicated. The journey to get to this point has been a long one.
Danziger was born in the Bronx in November 1943, the oldest of six kids. His parents both studied art in college and both worked in advertising. “And they always had art materials around the house," Danziger says. "Pastels, oils and watercolors and lots of paper. ... I loved it, I just loved to draw.” His parents, he says, encouraged him.
As a kid, he remembered seeing cartoons in the paper and wondering how the artist crafted a particular image. He loved going through New York’s museums and libraries and people watching on the street.
While he dreamed of being a cartoonist as a kid, his path to get there took some twists and turns. There was college in Colorado, where he worked briefly for newspapers in Denver and met his first wife. Lured by low housing prices that included land, they moved to Plainfield, Vermont, and he took a job with General Electric.
Then the Vietnam War came knocking.
“I was drafted in '67, and when you were drafted, you owed them two years,” he says.
Danziger ended up serving four. To avoid the front lines he signed up for officer and language training and spent a year in Texas learning Vietnamese. When he finally got to Vietnam, he served as a linguist and an intelligence and ordinance officer. Part of his job was managing weapons and vehicles for combat. He was awarded a Bronze Star and Air Medal for his bravery and service.
Learning to speak rudimentary Vietnamese was difficult, he says, but it gave him a unique perspective about his supposed enemies. “I think they’re wonderful. I think they are the friendliest, silliest. ... They are hard workers and they have been dealt some lousy luck in this life, and it was very difficult to dislike them or to hate them and to shoot at them.”
Danziger wrote a novel about the Vietnam War in 1991. Thirty years later, he wrote a memoir about his own four years in the Army, called Lieutenant Dangerous, which he says is how the Vietnamese pronounced his name. The memoir is funny and sad and mostly describes his anger and frustration at the waste, corruption and death he witnessed. He says his war experience taught him to accept nothing at face value and to hold people in power accountable — something he began channeling into art in the mid 1970s.
Work with the Rutland Herald and Barre Times Argus led to jobs with the New York Daily News and Christian Science Monitor.
While Danziger’s cartoons have garnered plenty of accolades, he’s also gotten his share of hate mail from readers who feel he’s gone too far.
Historically, he says he's relied on editors to make that call. But he feels standards are different now.
“There's no hiding the fact that a lot of it has changed because of Trump. I mean, he's just, he's on a level of rottenness that I don't understand. He destroys everything he touches." Danziger says. "Well, you can say that once or twice or three times, but you can't say it more than that. People who don't agree with it don't want to hear about it. People who do agree with it, they've already heard it."
It’s a challenge, he says, to get more creative. But backing down isn’t an option. "Our times now, with wars ... I mean, we are very possibly, could be on the crux of World War III. Everybody says, 'No, we're not.' But if you've read a lot of history, we are,” Danziger says softly.
That frightens him. Cartooning, he says, helps him process that fear.
“It’s like theater," Danziger says. "You put people in the scene and you give them something to say. You have to organize your thoughts and say, 'Well, in this scene, what am I really afraid of?'”
His work has also helped him through difficult personal times, like the death of his second wife Kim in 2016, and his only son Matt later that same year.
At 81, Danziger still runs most days and says he still uses a set of free weights in his basement. He just finished a prototype of a feature-length animated film about cat detectives that he says is now seeking investors.
Asked about plans to retire, Danziger shakes his head and laughs.
"No, what would I do all day, play golf? Drawing is just too much fun," he says, smiling. “It’s like songwriting. There’s the music and there’s the words. Well, in cartooning there’s the artwork and there’s the words. And sometimes you just have to hit people right and sometimes it hits you right.”
And when it all comes together and it’s published for the world to see, even after fifty years, he says, there’s nothing like it.
