Terry Wise
I’m a Kentucky native, having been born near Hodgenville, living now in historic Glendale (home of the world-famous Whistle Stop restaurant) with my lovely and deserving of your sympathy wife, Debbie. We have two daughters, more wonderful than I deserve, who try to shelter their friends from my humor, cartoons, and opinions, but I end up speaking at their schools too often for that to work.
I never thought about being a cartoonist. I wanted to be a “serious” illustrator and worked toward that goal for many years. What I found is that good illustrators are about 3 cents a dozen and there was no money to be made, so (mostly by accident) I pursued cartooning as a career.
I’ve been published for about 18 years, the first 11 of those in Elizabethtown’s daily paper, The News-Enterprise. I've taught computer aided drafting at the local college until this past year. Now I draw and fish a lot.
Having been self syndicated the last 7 years, I cater more to smaller market rural papers (those are the folks I best relate to). However, my work has made its way into some larger papers and I’ve managed a few national publications, a lot of web work, and am syndicated in Europe through Cartoonstock.com (where I’ve learned that Europeans don’t exactly understand redneck humor). Other than all that, I pretend to farm a little, fish, cartoon greeting cards and the like, do some consulting for local industry.
I don’t consider myself a pure conservative, but I do consider myself a mourner in the demise of common sense, and political correctness makes me barf. If that shifts my cartoons to the right, then that’s where I am.
I don’t plan to stop cartooning, even if all my papers fired me. It’s not something I do by choice anymore… it’s some kind of genetic flaw and I have to have a fountain pen and a piece of paper near by or go fetal in a corner somewhere.
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