 R.J. MATSON USA | |
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R.J. Matson is a political cartoonist and freelance illustrator based in New York City. He draws one cartoon a week for The New York Observer, two cartoons a week for Roll Call, and one cartoon a month for The Nation. He is a frequent contributor to Mad Magazine, and his illustrations appear in numerous newspapers and periodicals. He has created the cover art for more than a dozen CDs put out by the Capitol Steps comedy troupe and has illustrated several books, including 13th Gen-Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?, The Single Woman's Guide to the Available Men of Washington, and How to Satisfy a Woman Every Time on Five Dollars a Day. The third child in a family of four, R.J. (affectionately known as Robert John) was born in Chicago in 1963, three weeks after JFK was assassinated. The strange confluence of defining moments in history and in his own life has never ceased to amaze him. He moved to Edina, Minnesota, an idyllic suburb of Minneapolis, the month Malcolm X was murdered and again to Frankfurt, Germany the summer Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were gunned down. He relocated to Brussels, Belgium, in 1969, where he lived for the rest of his formative years before returning to Edina, only after Nixon had resigned and the U.S. had pulled out of Vietnam. In the fall of 1981, a few months after Reagan got shot, R.J. went off to New York City to pursue a higher degree of cynicism at Columbia, where he soon began drawing cartoons for the Columbia Daily Spectator. His weekly comic strip College Walk won a National Scholastic Press Association award in 1984. Happily, no major American political leader has been shot or forced to resign in disgrace since Mr. Matson began publishing his work. (Sadly, there have been no major American political leaders in all that time.) Emboldened by his modest collegiate cartooning success and secure in the knowledge that his Ivy League English B.A. and Mixology B.S. degrees would provide should all else fail, R.J. set up shop in Washington, DC in the hot and sticky summer of 1985, when the hole in the ozone layer was discovered. By day, he contributed cartoons and illustrations to States News Service, Washington City Paper, The Montgomery County Sentinel, Roll Call, American Banker, and the Capitol Steps, and, by night, he poured drinks for tips-until he landed a part time job as Art Director for The Washington Monthly in 1987. He returned to New York when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, started drawing cartoons for the recently launched New York Observer, and has never had to get dressed and leave his home studio to work a day-or night-job since. R.J. was married in 1991 during the Gulf War and divorced five years later during the O.J. Simpson trial. He has made it this far thanks in large part to the love and support of his ex-wife, Samantha, who believed in his potential as a cartoonist very early on. | |
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