My interviewees are a cluster of people. I’ve invited them to pose questions which I will try to answer here.
What was your very first cartoon? And the first to be published?
Would you believe me if I said I don’t recall? I’ve always been interested in drawing. As an eight-year-old, my dad would ask me to draw him as he sat in front of the radio listening to the evening news. He’d rouse after a bit and say, “Let me see what you’ve got.” He wasn’t an artist, but had a good eye, and he would say, “You need to move the ear up” or “the eyes are too wide.” Something like that. I’d erase and he’d go back to sleep.
In the fourth grade, the principal recognized my drawing of President Truman. First cartoon? I honestly don’t know. In the seventh grade when the teacher had the class go around the room saying what we wanted to be when we grew up, I got a laugh when I said, “Cartoonist.” Eventually, most of those teachers had my stuff on their walls.
The first to be actually published might have been in seminary. Each day before systematic theology class, I had taken to doing a sketch of the professor in various humorous situations on the blackboard. As a result the editor of our student weekly (yes, we had one in those days) asked me to give him a drawing each week. Now, in the rural bayou church I was pastoring, I had been sending the editor of our parish weekly a devotional, so now on a hunch, I sent a cartoon along with it. He published the two side by side, giving me (free of charge!) a third of a page in each week’s edition. Interestingly, that editor and I never communicated, never swapped notes, nothing. He published what I sent him. As a result of that publicity, my little church doubled and tripled in size in less than three years.
How did you learn to cartoon?
I’m still learning. When I was 16, I took the correspondence course from Art Instruction Company of Minneapolis. This was weekly lessons from real artists, rather intimidating for this country boy with no training. My sister who had just finished high school and become a telephone operator paid the $10/month. I had thought it was a drawing course specializing in cartooning. But 18 months into it, once they started teaching me to design draperies, I let it lapse. But I had learned a great deal, including perspective and lettering, and the use of speedball pens with black India ink.
When did you start drawing for Baptists?
The year was 1970. Dr. Hudson Baggett was editor of the Alabama Baptist. His secretary was Lee Alys Orr, who had belonged to our home church in Birmingham (where I was baptized as a college student, met my wife, was called into the ministry, married and ordained!). Lee Alys’ children grew up alongside my wife Margaret and me so we were forever bonded. Anyway, she told Dr. Baggett about me and they contacted me.
He paid me $1.50 a week. (Smile please.) And in those days, without copying machines, I had to send him the original drawing. Which I never got back.
I had finished seminary and was serving a little church in the Mississippi Delta (Greenville, MS). One of my members was advertising director for a grocery chain, and he helped me make copies of my drawings which I then peddled to other newspapers. Eventually, the Birningham News and the Jackson Daily News as well as the Tupelo paper began running a cartoon on their religion page each week. After a few years, the Copley News Service out of San Diego bought the cartoons from me, which they marketed as a package (i.e., with numerous other features) to small newspapers throughout the country. The problem there is you never knew if anyone was using the cartoon or not. It didn’t pay much, but I forget what.
Anything interesting happen along the way?
Well, in the late 1970s as a member of the SBC Foreign Mission Board, the editor Leland Webb ran one of my cartoons in each issue of The Commission, their monthly magazine.
At that same time, I flew to Singapore and spent two weeks with our SBC missionaries working up an evangelistic comic book for use there. After the artwork was transferred onto acetate cels, we laboriously hand-colored it (in my living room, using acrylics, working by hand on a light-box, involving lots of volunteers!). Then, the church paid to have it professionally printed in full color. A real comic book! The 10,000 copies were first sold on local newsstands in Singapore, then given to the churches to distribute. All of this while pastoring a large church.
The editor of Pulpit Helps magazine called from Chattanooga asking if I would send him a cartoon for each month’s issue. Since that editor was an old friend (Dr. Joe Walker) from seminary days (our wives had worked together in the Baptist Bookstore, then Joe and I had pastored in the Mississippi Delta near each other), I was happy to comply. They ended up running my cartoon in every issue of that paper’s existence–which was several decades, through numerous editors. Once they printed up a book of my cartoons to distribute to new subscribers.
Sometime in the early 1970s I attended a training course on personal evangelism for the SBC Home Mission Board in Atlanta. The Director, Dr. Jack Stanton–one of God’s great originals!–ended up taking the drawings I did of that event, which were mostly my doodles, and using them for many years in evangelism training across America. We became lasting friends and many years later, when he retired from teaching evangelism at Southwest (Missouri) Baptist University, I emceed the banquet. And yes, showed a few cartoons for the occasion.
You’ve drawn for Baptist Press for nearly 25 years. How did that happen?
Will Hall, who was the executive in charge of BP, had decided the website needed cartoons. So, Will simply phoned a number of Christian cartoonists around the country and asked if they would supply the cartoons. Two things stand out in that conversation. He said, “You can give us one cartoon a week or one a day. Doesn’t matter.” I said, “I’m fast. So I’ll send you one every day.” And I’ve done that for all these year, missing a short gap only when I was dealing with cancer surgery and radiation. (Note: I don’t actually send the cartoons day by day. Once a month, I’ll email him 20 to 25.)
The other thing I recall is Will said, “We can pay you a dollar and a half for each cartoon.” When I began laughing, he said, “What?” I said, “That’s the same amount Dr. Baggett paid me in 1970 when I started out.” He went to $100 a month and it has held steady since.
For several years there were a half dozen cartoonists displaying their works on the BP website. Eventually–I have no idea why–that became one cartoonist: Joe. And I’ve been the sole cartoonist for a decade or more. (I’ve assured them money is no object, that I’m perfectly willing to do this for nothing.)
Once when Art Toalston was the executive editor, I asked about a raise. Art said, “No raise, Joe. If it was up to me, we would not be carrying the cartoons at all.” Oops. Okay. Sorry I brought it up. (What’s funny is that decades earlier when Art was religion editor for the Jackson (MS) Daily News, he’s the one responsible for running my cartoons in his paper each Saturday on the religion page. He’s still a great friend.)
Anything controversial happen as a result of your cartoons?
Not really. Many years ago, the editor of the Oklahoma Baptist was running two of my cartoons every week, if you can believe that. He told me that some fellow once asked him, “What does this McKeever fellow have against preachers?” Dr. McCartney said, “Nothing. He is one.”
Dr. Hudson Baggett, longtime editor of the Alabama Baptist, told me the most controversial thing to happen in his tenure was one of my early cartoons. It was during a tense moment at the SBC meeting in New Orleans. That night the Baptist Sunday School Board (before it was Lifeway) had announced (with an unveiling!) the new name for Church Training, the Sunday night feature of our churches in which classes for training were held. Everyone was eager to learn the new name. The announcement said they had paid big bucks for a research firm to study this closely and find just the ideal name. The board had proceeded to print up a million dollars of study material for the next quarter. The night came, the film rolled, and finally, the announcement was made: The church training feature would henceforth be known as Quest: The Training Place.
I thought, “Quest? Well, okay. Sounds strange but I guess we’ll get used to it.” The next day I walked into the business session of the convention to hear that someone had moved “We find the name Quest unsuitable, and reject it.” They gave three reasons: 1. As followers of Jesus, we are not on a quest; He is the object of our search and we have found Him. 2. Quest is the name of a feminine hygiene product. (I thought, Hmmm. Who would know that? Those things were new on the market then.) And 3. It just sounds silly: “Come with me to Quest.”
They discussed it on the floor, took a vote and it passed. The SBC was rejecting this entire project of the BSSB. The million dollars of literature they had printed would have to be trashed. Money spent on the research firm was wasted. It was a huge rebuke to denominational leadership in Nashville.
The next day, I handed the editor’s secretary my cartoon, which they ran in that week’s Alabama Baptist. In the drawing, a man had entered a drug store where a placard for “Quest” sits on a counter. The clerk is saying, “Sorry sir, we’re fresh out. But you might try the Baptist church down the street.”
Personally, I thought it was cute and nothing more. But Dr. Baggett, the editor, told me he had several harsh phone calls from Nashville taking him to task for that “cruel cartoon,” saying how offended they were by it. He said to me, “Joe, I would not have run it if I’d known how they would take it. Truth is, I didn’t know what it meant.”
What did you learn from that?
I learned to pay close attention to what I was saying in a cartoon. My sense of humor–which had always been sharp and pointed–needed to be tamed and made Christlike before God could use it.
(continued in Part II)