Among his accolades while at The News, Wright had won the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award for editorial cartooning in 1980 and 1984.

I caught up with Larry to look back at his career, including how he helped build one of the first newspaper websites back in 1994, and what it has been like to work in one of the last two-newspaper cities, and at one of the last two-editorial-cartoonist newspapers.

Eric Millikin: You’ve been a fixture in newspaper cartooning in Detroit, at both The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, for decades. Tell me about how you got your start and how newspaper cartoons are different now vs. then.

Larry Wright: I’ll turn 70 in about three weeks and I’ll have to admit that I’m glad I entered the business in 1961 instead of recently. My first cartoonist job was as a free-lancer for the Okinawa Morning Star, an english language newspaper on the island where I was serving in Army ASA intelligence. Once I got called into my base commander’s office and ordered to stop doing a series I had been drawing for the paper on JFK and his pal Eleanor Roosevelt, who was trying to make a deal with Cuba to release prisoners from an invasion attempt. The Lt. Colonel told me JFK was my commander-in-chief and I had to be nice to him. Luckily the newspaper dealt with a full-bird colonel in the office of the general that ran Okinawa until we gave it back to Japan. He told my commander to leave me alone, but I did pull a couple of toons out so I wouldn’t get busted before I got discharged.

I took my discharge on Okinawa and went to work full-time as a cartoonist at the Morning Star. After about 6 months their night news editor stole some money and jumped on a plane back to the U.S. and they offered to train me to take his job. I ended up as cartoonist and night news editor and worked four years for the Morning Star before I came back to the States with my wife and kids and went to work for the [Detroit] Free Press in 1965.

EM: I’m pretty familiar with your editorial cartoons and daily single panel comic, “Kit ‘N’ Carlyle,” but let’s talk about your other comic, “Wright Angles,” from the 1970s and 80s. I’m looking at a Detroit News from 1977 where they’re running “Wright Angles” huge on the back of their comics section, bigger than any of the other comics, taking up two-thirds of the width of a huge 1970s newspaper page. How did that come about? Was that type of big showcase for the local cartoonist a common thing in newspapers then? It seems like quite a contrast to what we see today.

LW: I originally began “Wright Angles” in 1968 while I was an assistant news editor at the Free Press. The title wasn’t my idea but I was so anxious to get started I didn’t fight it. I think I first started at three a week as 6 panel toons and gradually become a daily 3 panel toon on the Freep‘s feature page. It was editorial and political from the start but I added regular characters who dealt with the issues. The News hired me away as a full-time cartoonist in 1976 and put me on the back page right next to columnist Pete Waldmeir, who was one of my favorite people in the business.

At about the same time I signed a “Wright Angles” syndication contract with United Media. This meant I wouldn’t put so much local stuff in it so I started doing a one-panel cartoon that ran for awhile in the first section but eventually got me moved into the Editorial Page department as op-ed cartoonist five times a week. I have to admit I felt much more comfortable at The News, which was still owned by the Scripps family and was a much more conservative paper than the Free Press. They did stay a little conservative after Gannett took ownership but the circulation went way down and The News no longer was the biggest paper in Michigan and the 4th or 5th biggest in the country.

EM: The Detroit News, which featured editorial cartoons by both you and Henry Payne up until recently, and before that both you and Draper Hill, has to be one of the last major metro dailies to have two editorial cartoonists on staff.

LW: The News only had Draper Hill and me as full-time editorial cartoonists from about 1977 to 1994. The first Gannett publisher, Bob Giles, called me into his office and told me The News could no longer afford two full-time cartoonists and suggested I try to join a team to develop an internet edition of The News, that at that time was pretty rare. He did say I could work out a deal with then Editorial Page Editor Tom Bray and continue op-ed cartoons but in an addition to the full-time internet thing. Since I’d been a Mac user since they first came out in 1984 it turned out to be a pretty satisfying job.

Draper lost his job several years later and even though I was no longer in the Editorial Page dept. they asked me to help find a replacement. I’m pleased I had a hand in helping to hire Henry Payne, and I still drew cartoons on the page across from him till recently.

EM: Let’s talk a little about the lifestyle of the semi-retired editorial cartoonist. Many comics artists in other parts of the industry (like in self-published art comics an even corporate super hero comics) don’t have the same type of employee benefits that come with unionized newspaper staff positions like I understand you’ve held at The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press. Should we be worried about artists like yourself making ends meet in retirement? Or do you have good pensions and benefits from either or both of the papers?

LW: Again, I’ve been lucky with my age. I turned 65 just in time to qualify for a full Gannett pension and full social security pension. Gannet sold the News [in August 2005] right after I qualified and it allowed me to continue working full time and collecting both pensions. The new owners did offer a buy-out less than a year later and I decided to take it. I was also able to negotiate a free-lance cartoon job and some of the auto collector stuff I had designed for the internet edition more than 10 years ago. They did end my cartooning for the edit page as of Christmas day but Daryl Cagle talked me out of giving it up. I’m now doing one cartoon a week for caglecartoons.com but I’m still doing the autos photos work for Detnews.com. In fact, I’ll be at the [North American international] Auto Show in Detroit this week.

I’ve been doing “Kit’n'Carlyle” 6-days a week since 1980 and recently signed another three-year contract with NEA.

EM: Anything else you’d like to say?

LW: By the way, comics.com shows reruns of “Wright Angles” on their website. Only they changed the name to “Motley.”

I caught up with former E&P senior editor Dave Astor, who had been cut in a previous round of lay-offs at the magazine, and we talked about life after E&P and the future of newspaper comics.

Eric Millikin: You’d been covering the newspaper comics syndicates for 25 years before Editor & Publisher let you go in Oct. 2008. What have you been up to in the year since then? Have you still been following the comics industry closely?

Dave Astor: I’ve been following the comics industry only semi-closely since my layoff, because I’ve spent most of my time trying to earn money or keeping busy in other ways. I haven’t found a full-time job despite many attempts, but I’ve done blog posts for The Huffington Post‘s comedy area, continued writing my 2003-launched “Montclairvoyant” humor column each week for The Montclair (N.J.) Times, and was elected to a two-year-term on the National Society of Newspaper Columnists board last summer.

Also, I’ve written more than 75,000 words of a book that includes a lot of material about cartooning and cartoonists. But I’d rather not get more specific about that because although I signed with a literary agent, I don’t yet know if the book will find a publisher!

EM: As you know, Editor & Publisher’s January issue is slated to be their last. What do you think this means for newspapers and comics? What will we be missing out on without Editor & Publisher?

DA: E&P was around for 125 years, and for much of that time it was probably the only media outlet covering newspapers and comics on a regular basis. But in recent years, there have been other excellent magazines, Web sites, and blogs also covering a lot of what E&P covered, so people can still read tons of stuff about comics and newspapers.

EM: We’ve seen all sorts of bad news for newspapers and newspaper comics in the last few years. Do you see any bright spots in newspapers, newspaper comics, comics and cartoons in general?

DA: There are many comic creators doing great work in print and on the Web, but it’s tough for the vast majority of them to make a living with their comics alone. Many of the cartoonists with traditional syndicates have seen their client lists shrink, and we all know how difficult it is to earn enough money with online-only work.

Some bright spots include more comics dealing with real-life issues (while still being funny) and more women cartoonists and cartoonists of color. In editorial cartooning, the full-time job possibilities are unfortunately grim at newspapers despite there being many talented editorial cartoonists around.

EM: This is the Dr. Seuss “If I Ran the Circus” question: If you were running a newspaper chain or comics syndicate, what risks would you be taking? What do you think the industry ought to be doing that they’re not?

DA:  If I were running a syndicate, I’d add more alternative-type comics and keep only the best “legacy” comics (which, as many cartooning fans know, are those comics whose original creator is dead – often long dead). The fewer “legacy” comics, the more slots there would be for talented creators trying to break into the business. I think a syndicate should have a mix of all types of comics, but, in general, the current mix is too tame and not modern enough to attract enough of the young-adult readers needed by daily newspapers.

And if I were running a newspaper chain, I’d publish dozens of comics in each of the chain’s papers, have a staff editorial cartoonist at each paper, and let reporters do livelier writing. I’d also settle for a smaller company profit and smaller executive salaries in order to pay for those dozens of comics, pay for those staff editorial cartoonists, and not lay off reporters. Obviously, no corporate-type person would let me run a newspaper chain in real life!

EM: Anything else you’d like to add?

DA: Given that I write a lot of (alleged) humor, here are four observations: If the universe is expanding, why are comics shrinking? If syndicates are looking for “the next Charles Schulz,” should aspiring cartoonists change their names to “Charles Schulz”? Do cartoonists who use assistants spend their retirement years in assisted-drawing facilities? When a newspaper tells a journalist “you’re laid off,” is the newspaper guilty of plagiarism for using those same three firing words other newspapers previously used?