My Sunday: Greg Kearney
Image: Greg Kearney, self-portrait
Greg Kearney has worked as an editorial cartoonist for over 40 years. His work is syndicated in 170 newspapers in the United States and abroad. He specializes in local politics and agricultural policy. Born in Maine, he lives in Topeka, Kansas.
Cereal, Cats, and Scouts. My typical Sunday is about the most boring scenario imaginable. Let's see, our church starts at 10:30. I get up. I'm diabetic, so I don't ever get to fast. I've never fasted, ever. So I'll get up, and I'll have my usual allotment of cereal and milk. Diabetics live in a world very constrained by what we can eat. So it's the same thing every day, at the same time every day. I wash up, get dressed. I live with my wife, Jill. No one else. We have cats. They don't go to church. At my age, my children have all grown and left on their own. It's just Jill and I now. We don't have to hustle around getting little children ready for church singing, "Saturday is a special day" or anything like that. I'll come down from my office after I dress. I volunteer with the scouts as a Scout Chaplain. So sometimes on Sundays, I get to wear my full dress uniform because I'm going after church and doing things with the scouts. I go and try to convince other people's churches to sponsor scouting. That's what the council has me doing. I've been involved with scouting all my life. As a boy, I was a Sea Scout back in Maine. And then I've held various positions all around the world as I've moved for work. I was a National Scout Chaplain with Scouts Australia.
The Cartoonist’s Mind. We have three wards in Topeka, and my ward is one of the smaller ones. I live down in the city center in a 1909 house that was built and owned by a Presbyterian minister, Reverend Solomon Alt. Everybody else downsizes at my age, but I've gone large here in this great big, gigantic house. It's on the National Registry of Historic Places. I've got a little metal plaque outside my front door. On Sunday morning, I come down from my office because my work sort of demands that I do something every day, or nearly every day. I know I'm not supposed to work on Sunday, but I do because my cartoonist mind never really shuts off. It keeps purring along, there. I usually try to draw Monday morning’s Kansas cartoon on Sunday. I'll sketch it, but I won't finish it usually, and then I go off to church. And then I'll do the inking and stuff either late on Sunday or Monday morning. So I'll go in, I'll sit down, and I'll just draw the sketch of the cartoon and then kind of leave it. And off I go to church. Because of the scouting, I get the chance to go to a lot of different people's services.
Ideas for Cartoons. For cartooning ideas, the internet's great because I can bring up the Portland, Maine paper or the Bangor, Maine paper or any of the papers in any of the states. And I look at the agricultural news publications: AG Week and Modern Farming. You're always looking for the kind of news story that jumps out at you. Every day I glance at them and try to figure something out. Every once in a while my sister will email me with something from Maine and go, "You've got to draw about this." I've never had much trouble thinking up the ideas. And I'm known for being very fast at drawing, which is a real advantage because of the amount of stuff I have to make.
BYU and Stamina. My first political cartoon goes back to when I was 15 years old in high school. I went right into BYU, I guess, as a published editorial cartoonist, but I kind of had to wait for Steven [Benson] and Pat [Bagley] to leave town, so that I could rush in there. One of the tricks to political cartooning is that it requires stamina. You've got to be able to sit down and do it every day. Some of my ideas are better than others, but the point is that you have to do it every single day, and it requires that stamina. The faculty advisor at the Daily Universe at BYU was telling me that they haven't really produced any cartoonists--I think there was only one other one after me--because they found that people could not sit there and come up with a good idea every single day and draw it out. And that's really the test of a cartoonist, of a political cartoonist particularly, or even a comic strip cartoonist: the ability to sit down and say, "I'm gonna make this every day."
Sundays and the Books of Mormon. My brain never shuts off from work. It just flies along because I've gotten up in the morning, and I probably sketched something, and it is sitting on my drawing desk. And then in the evening I know I have to ink it. It takes me, from the time I start sketching till the time it's a finished drawing--unless there's something unusually complicated about it--I usually have the whole thing done and dusted in under an hour. The one project that I've tried to work on on Sundays, which is different and is church related has been very slow going. (I have a newfound appreciation for Joseph Smith doing this.) I have been going through and formatting in ePub format for computers, a version of the Book of Mormon, which has both the LDS and the RLDS versifications, side by side, so that no matter which system you use, or are accustomed to, you can go to that and then find the corresponding versification of that section in the other. The texts are identical, but the marking of the verses is different. I have family in both ends of the thing [LDS and Community of Christ], and that always drove me crazy. I work on that sometimes after dinner. I'll sit down and try to do one chapter, "Just one more chapter."
The end. That's it, in general. I have dinner, and I watch a little television, and I might ink the cartoon if I have the time. Otherwise, it waits till Monday. And that's it. You know, like I said, it's really kind of boring around here.