ComicsDC: Catching up with Daniel Boris on his editorial cartooning

Wednesday, November 09, 2022

Catching up with Daniel Boris on his editorial cartooning

A bit over a decade ago, I interviewed Daniel Boris for the Washington City Paper. He recently reached out to talk about his fledgling political cartoon career.

As I believe you already know, I've loved cartooning since I was a kid and my childhood dream was to be a syndicated comic strip artist. I graduated from art school and have been a professional graphic artist for most of my life. I was also a finalist in the 2010 Washington Post's, "America's Next Great Cartoonist" contest, with a comic strip I called "Hoxwinder Hall."

Several years ago, after more than 25 years of working in that industry, I was laid off and decided to try something completely different. I became a licensed home inspector, and then in late 2018 I became a real estate agent. In 2019 I won Rookie of the Year at my brokerage and have fortunately been a top-producing agent ever since. For a couple of years there -- while I was busy working as a real estate agent -- I didn't create any art at all and I eventually started to miss it. During lulls in my real estate business I began creating art again, and it's the editorial cartooning that I enjoy the most.

Currently the only place my editorial cartoons are being published is on my own social media platforms (my blog, Facebook, InstaGram, and Twitter pages). I've received very positive feedback wherever I share my cartoons. My most recent cartoon is the Before/After Elon Musk Twitter piece. So far that cartoon has received 265 Shares on Facebook, which makes me feel pretty good. You never know when your art will resonate with people on a large scale, but that one certainly does!

I create my cartoons entirely digitally now, drawing on a WACOM tablet, in Adobe Photoshop, using a desktop PC. After the 2016 election, I was inspired to start creating editorial cartoons. I was mostly lampooning Donald Trump, because how could you not, right? So much material there... Ha Ha! My first political cartoons were pretty rough, but the more of them I created, the better I got at it. Over the past 6 months I have made an effort to consistently produce more cartoons. I believe the quality of my work has significantly evolved and become polished to the point that I now aspire to be a professional syndicated editorial cartoonist. I'm friends on Facebook with quite a few syndicated editorial cartoonists. They all have been very gracious with their feedback and complimentary of my work. Because of their encouragement, I have gained the confidence to begin reaching out to syndicates.