Here’s a nice article about Steve Sack, our brilliant cartoonist who worked for decades for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The article ran in Editor & Publisher magazine, written by Rob Tornoe, who is the Columnists Editor for Cagle Cartoons. Be sure to check out Steve’s cartoons on Cagle.com and support his Substack page.
———————————————-
By Rob Tornoe
Journalists are used to overcoming adversity, but what if you’re a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and you suddenly can no longer hold a pencil?
That’s the situation Steve Sack faced in 2022.
The resident cartoonist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune since 1981, Sack was a few years removed from defeating cancer with a combination of chemo and radiation when the fingers on his right hand began to feel numb. Four months later, his right hand was so numb he was no longer able to grab a pencil, pen or anything else he could use to draw his cartoons.
So abruptly and reluctantly, after 42 years and over 10,000 cartoons, Sack was forced to retire from the Star-Tribune. He wasn’t even able to pen a goodbye cartoon to his loyal readers.
“I gave up,” Sack said.
In retirement, he followed other creative pursuits, including sculpting. But in 2025, on something of a lark, he decided to sign up for life-drawing classes and began doing simple gesture drawings with his left hand. They weren’t great at first, but he kept going, kept practicing and began to gain more coordination and control.
He still hadn’t drawn a political cartoon for more than three years. That changed when ICE surged into the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul beginning in December 2025.
The sudden influx of agents led to months of chaos in the streets. Some schools were forced to shift to remote learning, and many city businesses took large economic hits. Two American citizens — Renée Good and Alex Pretti — were killed by ICE agents, and a 36-year-old arrested by ICE agents in Minneapolis died while in custody in Texas in January.
“The war came to us,” Sack said. “Living here during that situation was harrowing. … The entire city felt like a blanket of anxiety. It was just creepy as hell, and I got more angry about it to the point where I grabbed my iPad and tried to do something about it.”
It was slow going, but Sack’s creative juices were ignited when he read about a local pastor who was also the acting field director for ICE in Minnesota.
“It was just so hypocritical to me to be a so-called ‘Man of God’ and working with such a godless agency, at least in terms of the way they conducted themselves,” Sack said.
So, Sack drew it. With his left hand. It was the first political cartoon he produced since leaving the Star-Tribune and losing the ability to draw with his right hand, and it quickly went viral. Subscriptions on his Substack began to grow, and suddenly, Sack had the cartooning bug again.
More cartoons followed, all drawn slowly but effectively with his left hand. Top Border Control Commander Gregory Bovino being forced out of Minneapolis. The apparent cover-up of a Department of Homeland Security investigation into Pretti’s death. All leading up to one of the most widely-shared cartoons he’s ever drawn — thousands of protestors forming a giant hand, ready to flick an angry ICE agent out of their city.
And just like that, Sack is back, a lefty drawing lefty. He has a profitable Substack with about 6,000 subscribers, and a couple of his cartoons are published each week by MinnPost, a local nonprofit online news organization quietly approaching 20 years of covering Minnesota. And he’s back with Cagle Cartoons, which syndicates his cartoons to news outlets across the country. (Author’s note: I have helped edit columns and contributed cartoons to PoliticalCartoons.com, which Cagle owns.)
Sack also reunited with his longtime Star-Tribune editor, Scott Gillespie, who joined MinnPost in 2025 to lead their Community Voices section and is as ardent a supporter of the impact of local cartoons as you’re likely to find roaming the halls of a newsroom.
“It’s one of the things I have not quite understood, looking from afar, at what some of the chains have done with opinion,” Gillespie told me after Sack retired. “I see the numbers on our readership of opinion content, and it would leave a hole if we didn’t have [local cartoons].”
So why didn’t Sack go back to the Star Tribune, his longtime home, which no longer has a cartoonist on staff after parting with his replacement, Mike Thomson, after just a few months on the job?
“They didn’t ask me to come back,” Sack said.
Watch Jeff Koterba (2025 National Headliners Award winner), Rick McKee (runner-up), and Adam Zyglis (the other runner-up) break down their award winning Trump-bashing cartoons of the year.
This is a nice how-to course on how to draw Trump bashing political cartoons. Come look!
Sack’s popularity online comes as the profession of editorial cartooning becomes untethered from news organizations. Following Walt Handlesman’s retirement from The New Orleans Times-Picayune and The Advocate earlier this year, I count fewer than 20 full-time editorial cartoonists on staff for news organizations in the U.S.
The vacancies extend to the Star-Tribune, which eliminated its editorial cartooning position in 2023, a decision Sack at the time described as “moving backward” and a “real loss to the readers.”
But, I’m also noticing a trend.
Sack’s devoted readers have followed him to Substack. So have fans of Ann Telnaes, the former Washington Post cartoonist who left the paper after they tried to kill a cartoon critical of the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos. The same goes for Kevin Kallagher, the former Baltimore Sun cartoonist and Pulitzer Prize finalist who still draws cartoons for The Economist. Pulitzer Prize-winner Nick Anderson’s Substack has collected over 12,000 subscribers, while his paid Counterpoint newsletter has over 70,000.
One way digital news organizations are building loyalty with their readers is with newsletters, which skip the dancing algorithms of Google and Facebook and land directly into someone’s inbox. So why aren’t more news organizations turning to cartoonists to power newsletters that could help grow subscriptions and engagement?
As a cartoonist myself, I’m obviously biased, but topical, biting and funny editorial cartoons remain as popular as ever online. It just seems like news organizations — run mostly by writers — are missing an opportunity, maybe because they don’t know what to do with them online. Or maybe they’re afraid a particularly biting cartoon can create a range of reactions (and potentially controversy) in ways traditional opinion columns typically don’t.
“When I started out, the guy who hired me, Chuck Bailey, said just one thing: ‘Never be afraid to make people mad, but just know why you’re doing it,’” Sack recalled. “Some editors like to stir things up a bit. It gets people talking not just about the cartoon’s topic, but also about the paper. You want to be relevant. You want to be in the conversation.”
Rob Tornoe is a cartoonist and columnist for Editor and Publisher, where he writes about trends in digital media. He is also a digital editor and writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. You can reach him at [email protected].
–
Subscribe to our FREE Daily Email Newsletter Here!
