A portrait of the artist: Pulitzer Prize winner Walt Handelsman reveals how he creates thought-provoking political cartoons.

• Author: Ross, Brooke
• Position: MEDIA - Interview

Walt Handelsman admits that he didn't always pay attention in school. "I would not recommend kids follow my path," he says. In class, "I doodled and drew."

Fortunately, Handelsman was able to turn his love of drawing into a career. Today he's one of the top editorial cartoonists in the country. His cartoons, which comment on everything from politics to pop culture, are syndicated to more than 200 newspapers and websites around the world.

Handelsman, who works for Newsday, a New York newspaper, has even won the Pulitzer Prize--twice. He was awarded journalism's top honor for his cartoons in 1997 and in 2007.

Handelsman grew up in Baltimore, and after graduating from the Park School, he earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Cincinnati. His first job out of college was in advertising.

"I thought it was OK, but I always had an interest in cartooning and in artwork," he says.

A Cartoon a Day

Handelsman started sketching cartoons whenever he could. "They were very rudimentary, beginner cartoons, but I stuck with it and literally forced myself to draw a cartoon almost every single night," he says. "No one was running them, but I wanted to learn how to do it."

Eventually, newspapers began picking up Handelsman's work. That was more than 30 years ago, and he's been drawing cartoons ever since. He worked at papers around the country before joining Newsday in 2001.

Coming up with ideas for editorial cartoons is the most challenging part of Handelsman's job. Sometimes a great idea just hits him, but usually, it takes hours of brainstorming.

"Ninety-nine percent of a cartoon is the idea, and 1 percent is the drawing," he says. "If you draw a beautiful [sketch] and ... it has no message, that will be much less effective than if you draw two stick figures speaking to one another and ... one has a funny or hard-hitting comeback."

To generate ideas for the six cartoons he needs to create each week,

Handelsman says he has to stay on top of the news. He reads newspapers at home and listens to the news on the radio in his car. He watches the news on the television in his office, and reads news websites and blogs "all day long," he says.

Each day, he creates a list of news topics that he thinks would work for the next day's cartoon. When considering a topic, he asks himself, What do people know about this issue, and what can I say about it that they will clearly understand?

"One thing that I've really strived for throughout my career is to make my...