Cartoons have long been used to capture the political zeitgeist.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Jan Ellen Spiegel to discuss her article, “A CT artist takes on COVID (and the world) one drawing at a time,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Jan’s article here.
WSHU: Hello, Jan. Your introduction to Pamela Sztybel was her small paintings of dogs in a poetry book. Then you saw she lived some of the time in Connecticut, and that's what prompted you to look her up. Could you just tell us a little bit about how that happened?
JES: Well, as you said, I was.. it was a book by the former poet laureate of the United States, Billy Collins, and I saw these, these, these paintings, and noticed that she was lived part-time in Connecticut, and what I did is I looked her up, and what came up was a series of sketches she had done related to Ukraine with a very personal story, but it was several years ago, from right when the war in Ukraine started, and I was kind of wondering, well, where was her head on this now? Because there was this personal story about her family, her grandmother had come from Ukraine, fled it during the Russian Revolution, and then had to flee Europe again after she had relocated to Poland after Ukraine, she fled with her husband and her son, who was Pamela Sztybel’s father, but obviously the war had continued all these years, and I was curious how she was looking at things now.
WSHU: So basically, what happened here is that she organically got into doing political cartoons because of COVID. Then the Ukrainian war happened, and since she had a background from Ukraine, that drew her to that.
JES: What happened in Covid was she could do more of a mocking type of thing, you know, like the Olympic rings, you know, making one look like a virus, but when it came to Ukraine, you could, it wasn't funny, nothing, absolutely nothing was funny about it, and she was trying to essentially access through her drawings what normal people were doing to deal with these kinds of things, and they were just absolutely, you know, some of them were just incredibly heart-wrenching. There was one she did of this teenage high school girl who was dressed in this beautiful red prom dress standing in front of her bombed out high school, it was showing people rescuing animals, it was there, was one in Helsinki that really touched me, where they showed all these shoes lined up with all these candles to mark the children being killed, so it was a, it was a very, very fine line that she had to walk because they could not be mocking, they, it had to be very, very serious. I mean, the one that was just as heart-wrenching was from a little Ukrainian girl; she used something from a Ukrainian boy called a letter to his dead mother that said, "Mama, thank you for the best nine years of my life. Many thanks for my childhood. You are the best mama in the world. I will never forget you.”
I mean, every time I read that, it just touches me. So, you can imagine what it meant to other people. She went through about six months, and then even she couldn't handle it anymore, because you know, as, as news professionals, we deal with this kind of stuff all the time, and to see somebody who is coming at it from sort of a humanitarian aspect is, is, is really curious. I should also add, you know, she was posting these again on Facebook and Instagram, and she actually put a link on there to World Central Kitchen, where people could donate to this very big humanitarian organization that feeds people all over the world.
WSHU: Well, that really takes me to the quote that you have from her here. She feels that if her drawings can prompt someone, somewhere, someday, to get a sandwich from World Central Kitchen, that would be her satisfaction.
JES: Yes, and I, and I, I think she still feels that way. She picked up things again. I mean, she did a lot of stuff with animals for a while that were funny and were fun, and you know, would make you laugh, that they were still caricatures, and they were still actual headlines. I mean, she was just absolutely soaking herself in the news every day, but when the infamous Oval Office meeting happened in March of 2025 as Trump came in for a second term, I mean, she was at it again.
WSHU: This is something really bold for an ordinary person who is not involved in the daily news coverage and has taken on this because of her convictions.
JES: Absolutely, and that is certainly what fascinated me once I realized the breadth of what she had been doing, not solidly for six years, but on and off for six years. She's been at this, and you know, again, for those of us who do this for a living, we have a hard time with the relentless flow of news that exists now, and here she's doing it just because she feels moved to do it, and she thinks it's important without any of that kind of training, really.
