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September 26, 2005
Siporin Obit
Mickey Siporin, an editorial cartoonist who freelanced to the Los Angeles Times, Newark Star-Ledger and other publications, died Sunday, September 18, of kidney failure associated with lymphoma.
"He was a unique cartoonist and a great guy, and I'll miss him," wrote fellow cartoonist Ted Rall.
Editor and Publisher took a look at Siporin's career last week.
The New Jersey resident regularly did cartoons for The Westsider weekly newspaper in New York City, and also freelanced cartoons to dailies such as the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Toronto Star, and The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. In 1995, Siporin won the New York Press Association's second-place award for editorial cartooning.
Siporin was also a professor at Montclair State University before retiring several years ago, and a filmmaker whose short movies aired on Cinemax, HBO, PBS, and Showtime. His parody of educational films, "How to Eat," is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Siporin -- syndicated by Chronicle Features in the mid-1990s -- was one of the creators featured in "Attitude: The New Subversive Political Cartoonists" edited by Universal Press Syndicate editorial cartoonist Ted Rall. In that 2002 book, Rall called Siporin "one of the country's most unjustly underexposed political cartoonists."
Rall told E&P's Dave Astor: "Mickey was the oldest cartoonist in the anthology, but he had one of the youngest styles."
Rall added: "If his work didn't appear in every newspaper in the country, that was their -- and their readers' -- loss. It was also tribute to his easygoing nature. Whenever I encouraged Mickey to do more marketing, he'd hem and haw. He wanted to draw, not sell. He was a cartoonist's cartoonist, and in a profession dominated by clones and copycats, one unlike any other."
- Dave Astor. J.P. Trostle contributed to this article.