20 Years of Laughs: Stegelin skewers, roasts and can make you spit out your coffee

Cartoonist Steve Stegelin is a snarky Charleston iconoclast who makes us laugh out loud, cringe and nod at political truths.

For 20 years, he’s been Charleston City Paper’s resident cartoonist, crafting award-winning drawings that got better year after year. His original gritty style morphed into colorful weekly panels on important issues that sometimes skewer, sometimes nail and always entertain.
What Stegelin does in his cartoons is nothing short of remarkable. He, like outstanding cartoonists around the world, distills issues in fresh ways to hold public officials and our region accountable.

In 2022, Stegelin won the “Rex Babin Memorial Award for Excellence in Local Cartooning” at the annual convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. It was a big deal.
Noted the judges: “His bold and unique graphic style renders everyone, including Gov. Henry McMaster, as if they jumped off a 1990s alt-weekly comics page. His tongue-in-cheek tackling of cynical political redistricting, mask hysteria, local gun-culture and shameful treatment of women’s reproductive rights in South Carolina all led the jury to unanimously deem Stegelin’s entry worthy of the prize.”

A truth-teller

Chris Lamb, a former College of Charleston professor who got Stegelin to illustrate a book on political comebacks, likened him to a truth-teller who shares great stories.

“Editorial cartoonists are satirists who cut to the quick of an issue using only a few or sometimes no words,” said Lamb, chair of the Department of Journalism and Public Relations at Indiana University Indianapolis. “They have to be able to draw well enough so readers can identify who they’re satirizing. If you don’t think that’s difficult, try it sometime. Steve, like all masters at their profession, makes his work look a lot easier than it is.”

Lamb said he loved Stegelin’s artistic style.

“He’s not a graduate of an art school like some cartoonists,” he noted. “Steve’s work is visually appealing but it’s the message that gets the readers’ attention. Good cartoons can make your wince and then spit out your coffee. Steve’s work captures the imperfect world of politics in a way that grabs you by the collar and commands you to pay attention to what’s happening around you.”

How Stegelin got to the City Paper

Former City Paper Editor Stephanie Barna remembers the newspaper learned about Stegelin’s cartoons after a daycare teacher mentioned to a staffer that her husband was a cartoonist. The staffer suggested to her that Stegelin contact the paper.

“Luckily, he was really talented, and we were thrilled to find such a unique talent in our midst,” she recalled. “His illustrations were hilarious, and his tone perfectly suited the paper.”

And he still does, as Barna observed: “Stegelin has a perfectly skewed sensibility. He can highlight the absurdity of what’s going on in the world and make you laugh. And in South Carolina, there’s no limit to the amount of absurdity in politics, so he’s always had the best material to work with.”

She said he quickly became a key feature in the City Paper with an instantly recognizable style. Through the years, he also started illustrating the always-popular Blotter, which is filled with weekly absurdity taken from police reports.

“He’s been such an essential contributor to the City Paper for 20 years, and I think Charleston is lucky to have such a talent in our midst. He’s a treasure!”

After Stegelin won the big award in 2022, he reacted with typical humility: “Cartooning can be very isolating in nature, where I spend my time crafting ideas in my own thoughts and then heads-down as I spill those ideas through a pen onto the art board,” he said. “To have Pulitzer-winning, career editorial cartoonists like Rob Rogers, Matt Davies and The Economist’s KAL select my work for this prize is an honor and humbling external validation that my voice has an impact in both Charleston and the larger political cartooning community.”

Let’s all toast Steve’s past 20 years … and prepare for another two decades of his snark.

(Editor’s Note: Hey Steve: We agree with all of this, but don’t let it go to your head! Your next deadline, you should realize, is Sunday.)

The quintessential cartoons

We asked Stegelin to name his top pieces that he drew for the Charleston City Paper
over the past 20 years. Here are his favorites.

2004: JGA III
In 2004, my artwork first graced the pages of the Charleston City Paper in that year’s Best of Charleston issue. Amongst a slew of illustrations with the theme of “Monkey,” I drew what would become my debut editorial cartoon for the paper. The target was the late John Graham Altman III, then a state legislator-turned-Charleston County School Board member. Known for his anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry and the plastic flamingos that littered his Folly Road yard, JGA III (as he was known in shorthand) would become a repeat offender throughout my first few years as the resident cartoonist.

2004: Hunley funeral
It only took around a month for my cartoons to spark an angry response. When I poked fun at the burial of the crew of the recently-dredged Civil War-era submarine CSS Hunley — or more accurately, at the Confederate reenactors who came to Charleston in droves for the event — the reenactors took offense, leading to a flood of hate mail. Fearing I may have lost my cartooning gig almost immediately out-of-the-gate, then-Assistant Editor Bill Davis assured me that, to the contrary, I had “arrived.”

2008: Henry Brown
A few years into my stint, the City Paper switched from black-and-white to full color, adding a new layer of depth to my cartoons. And for a long time, the available canvas for my cartoon would change each week, depending on the verbosity of the columnist I shared the page with. Despite all these changes, one constant was — and continues to be — South Carolina’s ability to produce hot-headed personalities to satirize. Case in point, former Republican Congressman Henry Brown, best known for burning 20 acres of Francis Marion Forest and a volatile debate performance against Democratic opponent (and eventual co-founder of LGBTQ+ advocacy group Alliance for Full Acceptance) Linda Ketner.

2009: Don’t cry for me, South Carolina
At times, I managed to extend the reach of my editorial cartooning from the Opinion page to the cover. When S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford disappeared to “hike the Appalachian Trail” only to end up in Argentina with his mistress, I once again got the opportunity to take the cover with an illustration of the Luv Guv as Evita. This piece — along with a handful of other editorial cartoons from the year — led to my first recognition with a South Carolina Press Association award for cartoons, an award I’d then come to receive routinely over the course of my career.

2009: Bipartisan-curious
Over time, my cartoons transitioned from the traditional single-panel format to a multi-panel comic strip. As such, the politicians I lampooned became more like a regular cast of characters, my own Peanuts gang performing alongside an anthropomorphic Democratic donkey and Republican elephant. One character who has had quite the story arc is U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who started as a John McCain sidekick willing to reach across the aisle, only to devolve into a Trump-era MAGA sycophant.

2011: Hairy election
Speaking of Trump, he — or at least his hair — first appeared as the punchline in a strip covering the Republican candidates vying for the 2012 Presidential nomination. The GOP indeed rebuffed his advances and birtherism that election, but they obviously failed to do so again four years later. Sigh, if only they had. Of course, since they didn’t, Trump would come to be a frequent player in my cast of characters.

2017: Tinderella
The annual Best of Charleston issues often provided an opportunity to embrace a theme instead of a political topic, and to spread out over a full-page canvas for a longer-form comic strip. The 2017 issue’s theme of “Fairy Tale” inspired a ribald Disney-fied satire of online dating, with a cartoon that continues to resonate with audiences years later.

2018: ‘Merica first
A silver lining of Trump and his MAGA movement is the fount of hypocrisy, hate and corruption to call out, and no more so than during his time in the Oval Office. This constant practice at honing my satirical commentary paid off professionally, as a handful of strips — including some related to Trump and his Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh — would receive an honorable mention in the Association of Alternative Newsmedia award for cartoons in 2019, an award for which I’d routinely be a finalist in the years that followed.

2022: Pro-life?
While plenty of cartoonists satirize events in Washington, D.C., and on the global stage, those covering South Carolina — much less, Charleston — are more rare. As such, I constantly hear appreciation from local readers when I turn my focus from national politics to instead highlight issues closer to home. This appreciation was shared by the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, when it presented me with the esteemed Rex Babin Award for Local Cartooning in 2022. To learn that a trio of Pulitzer Prize winners — Rob Rogers, Newsday’s Matt Davies, and The Economist’s Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher — judged my work worthy of the recognition definitely helped quiet the ol’ Imposter Syndrome some, as does my now sitting on that same panel, judging the same level of work in which I once competed.