David Pope on the struggles of the daily cartoonist

It was January 7, 2015, and the offices of the French satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, were under attack by an Islamic terrorist group. Pope turned on the television and watched, horrified, as the news unfolded that 12 people had been killed, and 11 others injured. Five of those killed were cartoonists.

“I was watching it and reading Twitter, along with other cartoonists - were were all watching at the same time,” he says.

“I thought I had actually met one of these cartoonists at a festival in France, who was shot, so it was particularly dreadful.”

Feeling helpless, he sketched out a quick, spontaneous cartoon that seemed to speak to the moment - a terrorist with a smoking gun, standing over the body of a dead cartoonist, saying, “He drew first”.

He tweeted it out, adding his own words to the flurry of commentary and commiseration. Then he went to bed.

The next morning, he couldn’t access the mentions in his Twitter feed, because there were too many. Millions of people had seen his drawing, and many more had re-tweeted it. Pretty much every newspaper in the northern hemisphere reproduced it, and interview requests were pouring in.

The thing was, though, there’s was nothing much more that needed to be said. The cartoon had been spontaneous and quick, quite unlike the process that goes into his daily cartoon for The Canberra Times, which is often labour-intensive and painstakingly plotted out. And he didn’t want to wade into the machinations of the magazine under attack. Charlie Hebdo was known for its provocative satire that didn’t always translate well beyond France’s borders, while Pope’s cartoon had managed to transcend all kinds of boundaries and nationalities and speak to everyone.

In the event, then foreign minister Julie Bishop presented the staff of Charlie Hebdo with a signed, framed copy of the cartoon on a visit to Paris later that year. Pope, meanwhile, has long reconciled himself to the fact that none of his cartoons will ever have that kind of reach again.

And that’s just part of the life of a cartoonist for a daily newspaper. Pope has been at it for 10 years now, having taken over after the retirement of Geoff Pryor, who drew for the paper for 30 years.

Until then, Pope had always drawn, but had never seriously considered full-time cartooning. He had applied, been accepted to and then turned down a place at art school at Sydney University.

“I think at that time I was just getting more into political ideas, so art school didn't seem very connected to that. I used to just draw little cartoons for activist organisations,” he says.

“I did a lot of part-time work, stopped and started my uni studies and eventually went back for five years, to study politics and economics.”

He knew, when The Canberra Times offered him the job, that he had big shoes to fill; Pryor had built up a loyal following among both his readers, and the politicians he regularly pilloried, for three decades.

As it turned out, the news was at a crossroads when Pope took over in 2008. Social media was rapidly taking hold of mass reading habits, and the news cycle was switching to a the 24/7 model we take for granted today.

“Obviously the world's always constantly moving, but somehow it's easy to feel like you're in a bit of a washing machine with the news, because it comes at you in so many different ways,” he says.

“You're connected with it so directly now, through your phones and through social media. And I still haven't worked out how to manage that.”

In the past 10 years, The Canberra Times has transformed from a newspaper to a media platform, and Pope has adapted along with it. But in many ways, Twitter and ISIS and constant leadership spills notwithstanding, the job of a daily cartoonist hasn’t changed. Like Pryor, Pope still has the challenge of producing a daily cartoon, which means sifting through the news of the day, picking an issue, deciding on an approach, and making it happen on the page.

Just don’t try and tell him that the daily smorgasbord of political shenanigans to which we’ve become accustomed must make his job easier - it almost never does.

“On a daily basis, there's this tension between the political news stories of the day, and having some fun with the personalities in that, and the idea that it represents something deeper,” he says.

“You don't want to be just the clown that's part of the circus. And then you realise the great privilege you have to actually get printed by the paper every day, and there's people working here, putting the paper together, printing it, distributing it, you have this privileged space, so what about the stories that aren't front-page news?

''I've always felt like the role of the cartoonist is to be inside and outside of the thing. It's a weird position that you want to be connecting and relating to the stories that the team is putting together and finding, but you also want to be a voice that's outside it a bit as well, and questioning social priorities that aren't getting a look-in.”

The key, he says, is to work out early on what kind of cartoon the end result will be. From a simple visual gag, to a complicated, multi-panel statement, Pope has always liked to mix up his daily offerings.

“Cartoons work because they operate at a sub-rational level, that's their power,” he says.

“Their power is in the visual image, so sometimes you just want to harness that and leave the words out because even if you put a lot of words in, it's those images that will stay with people.”

He points out, here, with some residual sense of amazement, that one of his most popular cartoons is still the front page image he created on the day of an NRL elimination final between the Canberra Raiders and the Cronulla Sharks in 2012. The image, of a viking riding a shark like a surfboard, was hardly subtle, but people still stop him in the street about it, and tell him that the day of the final (the Raiders won) was one of the best days of their lives.

Conversely, when it comes to federal politics, the intrigue and tomfoolery has been a constant, endless gift these past 10 years, but Pope has always wanted to delve deeper than just a poke at the first dish of the day.

“You don't want to get into just drawing leadership struggles as these little personal ambition stories,” he says.

“It's almost that horse race journalism stuff, who's up and who's down. Who's being stalked by a potential rival and who isn't. What does it reflect, and how can you portray the deeper political changes that are occurring?”

From straight-out gags to deep reflections, from simple, arresting images to complicated visual metaphors, the challenge is often to choose one and see it through until the work’s done.

“There's a number of things you're trying to hold together at the same time, and they're all in tension with each other, and you resolve that tension each day in a different direction and you're never happy with it because you think oh god, no one's going to know this story, that's old now, we've moved onto this,” he says.

More often than not, Pope is troubled by what’s going on, particularly when it comes to news about the environment, or social inequality. It can be hard to find the right way to comment on what’s happening, and keep the tone right.

“Cartoons are a bit of a blunt instrument. We talk about a picture being worth a thousand words, but there's plenty of time where a thousand words beats a picture, hands down,” he says.

He remembers one of Pryor’s works, from 1997, filed for the Sunday paper the day after the implosion of the Canberra Hospital, during which one of the spectators, 11-year-old Katie Bender, was struck and killed by flying debris.

“He just wanted to acknowledge how everyone felt. So he had this incredibly sombre, wordless piece that was just a piece of rubble on a picnic rug,” he says.

“That's another way of doing the daily cartoon - just acknowledging. It's not necessarily having a big point to make, but acknowledging emotionally where things are at.

“The genre is very flexible, it can be just a gag, it can be a sombre reflection, it can be something that's trying to tell a deeper story.”

In many ways, it’s an irony that Pope’s best-known cartoon will be one that took the least reflection, and the least time to create - that was an immediate reaction to an awful, unfolding crisis. But it does show both the power of an image, and the ways in which a work can transcend global boundaries, in a way they didn’t in Pryor’s day. That was just a decade ago, but the world has changed irrevocably.