Michael Shaw

Michael Shaw’s Cartoonium Vitae

Tragedy, plus time, equals comedy. But who's got time anymore?

Michael was not born in the house that his father built, but the house, in Jefferson County, Missouri, his father added onto three or four times. (Depending on what one considers to be an “addition.”)

Christmas morning, 1968, a copy of Thurber and Company arrives with the expected swag of G.I. Joes and Hot Wheels. Why? Michael wonders to this very day… OK, bring on the bullet points!

• Flourishes to as close as he was going to get to splendid manhood. Graduates from Hillsboro High School determined to escape. Attends Webster University, graduating with a B.F.A. in painting. Finds the demand for Abstract Expressionists in the greater St. Louis area to be mysteriously waning…

• Travels through Europe, living in Greece for a year. Teaches English in private schools. First cartoon published in The Athenian, Greece’s largest English language magazine. Returns to St. Louis and discovers the demand for Abstract Expressionists to be inexplicably unchanged. Hired as an art instructor for the St. Louis public schools. Begins publishing cartoons in St. Louis magazine. May have dated Cheryl Crow. That’s his story and he’s sticking to it.

• Takes an extremely early retirement from teaching to pursue a Master’s Degree at the University of Missouri School of Journalism at Columbia. (The world’s first, and perhaps the most confusing, when everyone thinks this is the Columbia University School of Journalism, which it isn’t.)

• The confusion continues. Michael’s emphasis is in advertising. Why? Let’s just call it an uneasy relationship with the truth. He completes a thesis…in cartooning! “Who Calls The Toons” examines the relationship between cartoonists, syndicates, and readership. And the nature of that relationship? Confused.

• Other academic achievements— St. Louis Press Association scholarships, Morris E. Jacobs Fellowships for graduate work in advertising, a Newspaper Features Council stipend for the study of the impact of comic strip size on readership. (The impact? Confusing.) Michael was also staff illustrator for The Columbia Missourian and published a much-beloved comic strip (at least to him) entitled “At the Zoo” in the University of Missouri Maneater.

Enough with the bullet points. Michael toils as a copywriter by day, for catalogs such as Land’ End, and draws cartoons by night. Publishes his first cartoon for The New Yorker in the Millenium Issue— the first issue of the 21st century. His cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker Book of Literary Cartoons, The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker, and The Rejection Collection I and II. His work has also appeared in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Prospect magazine in the UK.

Bob Mankoff, Cartoon Editor of The New Yorker sums up Michael’s talent this way— “There are good/good cartoonists, and good/bad cartoonists. Michael is a good/bad cartoonist.” Michael (that would be me) agrees.