BIOGRAPHY
Don Landgren Jr. is a caricaturist and freelance editorial cartoonist. Since 1998, I have been entertaining at private parties, weddings, college and corporate events with my caricature business, PARTOONS: Caricatures by Don Landgren Jr. Check out my website and hire me for your next party or function!
My drawing experience goes waaay back. In kindergarten, I remember drawing black lines on top of a tiger I drew. In an epiphany, I had a self-taught lesson on foreground and background as the tiger suddenly looked like it was inside a zoo cage. My love for cartooning flourished in middle school while attending Mountview Junior High. My art teacher, Lou Lucas, was a mentor and encouraged me to draw cartoons. He had me fill up two blank books of drawings in 7th and 8th grade. I drew all sorts of animals and people and copied cartoon characters from any sources I could find —comic strips, cereal boxes, TV and advertising. If only I had the internet back then! It was in middle school when I created my comic book superhero. When trouble was about, mild-mannered Melvin could jump into any nearby garbage can and emerge as the banana-peel-wearing superhero known as Garbage Man. In 1973 my art and byline was published for the first time in the newspaper. My drawing for the Happy Time Page's Line-O-Graph contest was printed in the paper's comic section. I received a $1 check from the T&G for my effort. The check was never cashed, as my father proudly framed it — he did give me a dollar though. I would get another Line-O-Graph drawing published in 1974. Years later, it would be me creating the Line-O-Graph line for kids. At Wachusett Regional High School I drew cartoons and my version of the Mountaineer, the school mascot, for the masthead of the school newspaper— The Echo. That same mountaineer would be printed on glass mugs sold by the football team for a fundraiser. In a journal for my creative writing class, I would do drawings instead of writing and even updated my Garbage Man character as class assignments. In college at Anna Maria I was studying art to be a medical illustrator because I heard they made money. I also began to try to get some of my cartoons published. I sold a gag cartoon to Dog Fancy and Cat Fancy magazines and to School Arts magazine. I drew a fire-helmet-wearing Dalmation for The Landmark's ever popular police and fire logs. One rainy day on my way home from class, I drove too fast through a puddle stalling out my convertible 1968 Chevelle Malibu. Walking home drenched from the rain, in what could described as an act of fate, a kind woman stopped to give me a ride home. That woman was Joanne Root, the editor and publisher of the The Landmark, a weekly newspaper in my hometown of Holden Massachusetts. I expressed my desire to draw cartoons and soon after I began drawing for the editorial page of her paper. In 1983, I abandoned the idea of becoming a medical illustrator partly due the the additional schooling I would need, but also because of the internship I created for myself. The internship in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette's Art Department gave me the thrill of daily newspaper work and from the satisfaction of seeing my work published. Since then I've been drawing editorial cartoons for central Massachusetts publications for 42 years. For 26 of those years — from 1982 to 2008, I drew cartoons for The Landmark. I did cartoons for The Item in Clinton, Mass., The New Leader in Spencer, Mass. and the Marlboro Enterprise/Hudson Daily Sun. In 2019, I restarted drawing cartoons for The Landmark on a monthly basis starting 2019. From April 2019 to December 2020 I drew cartoons for Worcester Business Journal, a twice monthly business publication serving Central Massachusetts. In 2020, I've started doing occasional illustrations for Compliance Week, a business intelligence magazine on corporate governance, risk, and compliance. My work has appeared in the Boston Herald, Editorial Humor, Constitution magazine, Public Citizen magazine, Dog Fancy and Cat Fancy magazines and in the yearly book series, Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year. My work was showcased, along with 150 other editorial cartoonists from across the nation, in the book "Attack of the Political Cartoonists" published July of 2004. I also drew award-winning editorial cartoons for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette since 2009. Most recently – from 2019 to 2022 – I drew cartoons for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette's Sunday Telegram and Worcester Magazine, a free weekly arts and entertainment publication. I worked for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette for 35 years. My career at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette started with my internship in 1983 to a part-time position to a permanent part-time position to full-time position until I was laid-off in 2018. My last position was Graphics/Multimedia Editor where I supervised the photography staff and I produced static and interactive online graphics for telegram.com and print graphics for the Telegram & Gazette. Over my 42 years in the newspaper industry I have won 103 awards for my work — 49 awards for my editorial cartoons, plus another 54 awards for my illustrations, page designs, graphics, ad and marketing designs. The awards are from these industry associations: New England Newspaper and Press Association, Massachusetts Press Association, Local Media Association/Suburban Newspapers of America, the National Newspaper Association, New England Associated Press News Executives Association (NEAPNEA) ,the Society for News Design as well as UPI New England. My cartoons have been published in the Washington Post and on USAToday.com and were occasionally featured in the opinion page of the print edition of USAToday. My cartoons were distributed to Gannett's newspapers through their USA Today Network. From 2014 to 2021 my cartoons were also distributed by More Content Now to Gatehouse’s 100 daily newspapers and nearly 1,000 weekly newspapers and their corresponding web sites. By googling "Landgren cartoon" you can see the numerous online newspapers that used my cartoons. One cartoon on recycling, published in the 1991 edition of Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year, has been used in many educational text books by publisher Steck-Vaughn. That same original cartoon is currently archived in the large collection at the Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library. My infamous ebonics cartoon is featured in "Beyond Ebonics," a book by Stanford University linguistics professor John Baugh published by Oxford University Press. The book, "Dante Redux: Trump’s Towering Inferno" was published in August 2022 and features 12 of my caricatures of Trump and his inner circle. I am a member of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, the International Society of Caricaturists Artists and the National Cartoonists Society. I am a graduate of Anna Maria College. Don and his wife, Jennifer, have two daughters and have and a cat. |
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