News > March 20, 2008

By Jacob Bathanti | Staff writer

Senior William Warren won the John Locher prize for editorial cartooning in 2006. Now he’s won a different sort of award to balance out the first. Warren will be presented with the Charles M. Schultz Award on April 18 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

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OGB cartoonist Will Warren recently won the Charles M. Schultz award, which he will accept April 18 in Washington, DC. (Photo courtesy of university news service)

This time the prize, which comes with an award of $10,000, is for his comic strip “Lummox,” which features the adventures of Goodrich and his freshman roommate, a Yeti-like fellow who lends his name to the strip. Warren submitted editorial cartoons to the cartooning competition twice before, but never heard back from the contest.

He says he still doesn’t know if he even submitted the entries correctly. In this case, though, the third time proved the charm regardless of the past two years’ results.

“I was pretty ecstatic when I heard,” Warren said. “Still am.”

It’s a timely career booster for the Atlanta native, who hopes to find work as a cartoonist after graduation. Although the politically opinionated Warren says that his first love is editorial cartooning, shrinking newspaper markets have rendered him pragmatic about which subset of the cartooning world he gets into.

“I’ll take whatever I can get,” Warren said. “From a purely logical viewpoint, it’s much more likely that I’ll get a job as a comic strip cartoonist.”

In a turn that perhaps Charles Schulz himself would have appreciated, Lummox and Goodrich are antitheses thrown together. Lummox’s sasquatch form is no accident – he’s a deliberately ambiguous construct: “that typical college kid.” The quiet, studious Goodrich is an apt foil to his simian roommate.

“I like (drawing) the comics because I like developing the characters and story lines,” Warren said.

This isn’t the first time Warren has achieved success by putting a pair of characters together.

His first comic strip, which he started when he was six years old, featured the adventures of a frog and lizard: “Rocky and Spade.”

While Warren calls the strip “pretty dumb,” it also entertained him and his friends for hours. This wasn’t Warren’s first foray into alternate worlds of pen and ink.

“I’ve been drawing since I was three,” Warren said. “Before I attained consciousness. Ever since I could hold a pencil I’ve been scribbling on paper.” While Warren says he’s fascinated by all forms of art, especially painting, his values and political passions take precedence even over his cartooning.

“I’d have to say that I consider myself an opinionated, convicted person first, and an artist second,” Warren said.

He’s not shy about making his convictions known. His political cartoons, some of which have appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, are unabashedly conservative. But a certain edginess sometimes shows through in “Lummox” as well – jabs at the excesses of university life, satirical pokes at college political radicalism or pretended radicalism.

“I can’t help but insert myself into the comics,” Warren said.

“At the moment, there’s less politics in the comic strips because there’s a dividing line between them and the editorials.”

Warren said, grinning, that if his future lies in comic strips then they’ll probably be considerably more political than “Lummox” is now, because of his need for an outlet for political sentiments. Still, his aims for the two sides of his work are not dissimilar. A sense of compulsion to express his views drives Warren in his art.

“In a grand sense, I want to convey my opinions,” Warren says. “In my political (cartoons), I want to challenge readers, and make people think, make them laugh. In the comics, I want to entertain, but provide entertainment that’s more elevated.”