A huge congratulation to Steve Brodner — this year’s winner of the Herblock Prize, the premiere award for editorial cartooning. Brodner is a relentless illustrator of political and social commentary whose work appears regularly in The Nation, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and other publications including stevebrodner.substack.com.
Judges for this year’s contest included Ann Telnaes, winner of the 2023 Herblock Prize and Jen Sorensen, winner of the Herblock Prize 2014. They stated “Brodner’s work is unflinching, driven by a strong moral compass and imbued with a powerful sense of compassion. As the quote from Herblock engraved on the trophy reads, Political cartoons, unlike sundials, do not show the brightest hours. They often show the darkest ones, in the hope of helping us move on to brighter times.’ His portfolio offers a mixture between traditional print media and the new opportunities that social media provides cartoonists. In a time of rising autocratic voices and governments, Steve’s work reminds us of the important role editorial cartooning has in a free press and democracies.”
Brodner’s 2004 career retrospective, “Freedom Fries”, and the story of the Covid years in the US, “Living and Dying in America” were both published by Fantagraphics Books. He is currently an adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
The Herblock finalist this year is Pedro Molina, whose work is regularly featured at Counterpoint. The judges said “Threatened by the regime in his native Nicaragua, Pedro Molina has proven himself a master cartoonist in the United States, where he chose to exile himself. Bringing an immigrant’s point of view, he depicts anti-immigrant rhetoric as toxic to the United States.” Molina says he wants to “alert US citizens of authoritarian behaviors that I have already seen and experienced as a citizen in Latin America for them to not fall into those same traps, such as the manipulation of religion, the control of the Judicial System by a single person, the violence, the populism and the search for common ‘enemies’ from outside our borders.”
The Herblock Prize is awarded annually by The Herb Block Foundation for “distinguished examples of editorial cartooning that exemplify the courageous independent standard set by Herblock.” The winner receives a $20,000 net cash prize and a sterling silver Tiffany trophy. Steve Brodner will receive the Prize on June 4th in a ceremony held at the Library of Congress. The Honorable Stephen Breyer, retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the U.S, will deliver the annual Herblock Lecture at the awards ceremony.
