A cartoonist to remember

October 30th, 2009, 6:21 am · Post a Comment · posted by madisontaylor

My favorite cartoonist doesn’t currently have a large national following — but that could change. In fact, based on what I’ve seen, count on it.

His name is Paul Trap, a freelance artist and house husband who now lives in New England. He’s a Michigan State grad, penned a a sports cartoon called Fourth and Inches, loves baseball in particular and during one stretch traveled the country in a purple Gremlin. Once as a souvenir from his travels west he brought me back a piece of fossilized mammal dung. I treasured it up until the day it vanished.

And, by the way, he used to work for the Burlington Times-News. So I might be a little biased where Paul is concerned. That doesn’t mean he’s not great, though.

Most readers today probably don’t remember Paul. Illustrators often toil in anonymity in dank offices where they live on coffee, cigarettes and jokes (both good, bad and some plain ugly). They have big dreams and tremendous ideas that expand with every sentence into something so totally new that others in the conversation couldn’t see it coming with three weeks’ warning.

It’s magic really.

In that respect, Paul was one of the finest magicians it was my pleasure to encounter in this business.

Paul and wife Patty arrived in Burlington in the late 1980s. While here he was responsible for dozens of incredible illustrations that accompanied our stories — particularly in lifestyles. What he will be remembered for, though, is his stellar work on a staff project about, well, garbage. Talking Trash was a special section that examined refuse, landfills, recycling — well, anything at all to do with solid waste management. Paul illustrated it all and designed each page in the section — which was printed on recycled paper. It’s still one of the best newspaper projects I’ve been associatecd with. And it received wide notice in Alamance County at the time.

Paul also created the Times-News mascot — a little bird known as the Red Baron that accompanied our daily front page weather forecast. It was a signature part of a new look for the paper then and one readers enjoyed.

Paul left the Times-News — as most do. Patty took a job in Colorado with the parks service and Paul drew the sports cartoon and a weekly Biz Fact cartoon for Knight-Ridder. After I left the Times-News in 1992 we lost touch until this year. Just this week another former Times-Newser Ed Price shared a link to page about a nationwide comic strip contest, Comic Strip Superstar. The judges include Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, Lynn Johnston of For Better or Worse and Scott Hilburn who is the genius behind Argyle Sweater — a comic I was proud to add to the Times-News lineup last year.

And I saw that one of the finalists is Paul Trap. His creation is called Thatababy. The panels I saw made me laugh hard — something I don’t often do when it comes to newspaper comics. I would certainly like to publish it in the Times-News should we get the chance.

“I’m flattered to be in the final round and excited that syndicated cartoonists were the judges,” he wrote to me in an e-mail. “I’ll count it as my degree of separation from Garry Trudeau and Doonesbury.”

By the way, readers can also vote for their favorite comic but must be a registered customer of Amazon.com to do so. Here’s the link. And here’s one more look.