I don't think being a cynic is necessarily a negative thing. It's a matter of seeing the world with clear and open eyes.

To keep doing this job [draw political cartoons] week after week, I think you have to want to change the world, while understanding that you can't. You have to hold both of those contradictory ideas simultaneously.

My biggest influence growing up was Mad magazine, which is a very text-heavy form of visual satire. I didn’t grow up wanting to draw donkeys and elephants with the names of politicians written across them.

Politics, like advertising, is about people selling you things you didn't really want or need.

I don't think that what I'm doing [political cartooning] is necessarily left versus right. What I'm addressing is top versus bottom. If I'm not spending a lot of time making fun of the more extreme elements of the Green Party, it's because what I do is to critique power.

My cartoons appear in newspapers, which are full of words, but there's something about having it in this little box that confounds people's expectations.

Good satire is about attacking the powerful, and that tends to be more the purview of the left. Maybe there's something about the conservative mindset that confuses mean-spirited name-calling and insults with actual humor.