I Am a Stupid A**hole

You know those life moments when you have the sudden realization that you are a stupid asshole? I recently had one of those moments, and it was a doozie.

A little backstory…

After college, I spent a couple of hazy years living in Vail, Colorado. Like a lot of young locals, I held multiple jobs in order to make ends meet and afford a ski pass for the season. In addition to several positions in the service industry, I was a graphic designer for The Vail Daily. This was back when graphic designers did pasteups the old fashioned way—with actual paste. I did everything from producing ads for local ski shops to laying out the Sunday comics with a ruler and hot wax (a project worthy of its own blog post).

One of my assignments was to design a feature graphic for a story about a cartoonist who was visiting the area at the time. I assembled a montage using various characters from the artist’s comic strip but was too busy monitoring the snow report to bother reading the column.

Yesterday—more than 20 years later—I came across that piece while looking through an old portfolio. I put it aside, thinking I’d take a picture of it and toss the original (something I’ve started doing in a less-than-successful effort to cut down on clutter). The article had been mounted and framed by the Daily’s editor and presented to me as a thank you for my work on the story. The frame is long gone, and the yellowing pages have spent the past two decades growing ever crispier under my bed.

There was a handwritten message on the piece, which I always assumed was from the editor. The signature was hard to make out, and since my attention was focused elsewhere in 1992, I never bothered to investigate.

What I failed to notice until yesterday, was an arrow pointing to a hand-drawn cartoon hidden amongst the other characters in the montage, which I’ve come to find was the cartoonist’s self-portrait. Using my keen deductive skills, I figured out the message must have been from the cartoonist himself! Mystery solved.

Sort of…

And now we’ve come to the point in the story where everyone realizes I am a stupid asshole.

Do the drawings above look familiar? Have you ever heard of comics like “Shoe” and “Pluggers?” That’s right—the guy who wrote me a special thank you note and sketched a self portrait on my design was three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, Jeff MacNelly. Not only did I almost throw away this one-of-a-kind memento, I never even followed up to thank the guy.

I had hoped to find Mr. MacNelly on social media so I could share my story and give him a long-overdue thank you, but a quick Google search revealed that he died in 2000 at the age of 52.

The irony is that I wound up becoming an amateur cartoonist myself. The tragedy is that I completely missed the time a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist thanked me for doing my job.

It’s one of those synchronous events that could only happen to a stupid asshole like me.