THE POWER OF THE PEN.

YOU MAY WANT TO DRAW AND QUARTER THEM, BUT THE BEST CARTOONISTS CAN MAKE YOU LAUGH AND THINK

Take it from political cartoonists: A picture is worth more than a thousand words. It may add up to a few thousand votes, a political sea change, or just the opening up of a mind or two.

Political cartoons aren't printed on the editorial page just to make you laugh. Most cartoonists like it when their work inspires disagreement or even outrage. These artists want people to respond to the opinions they express in their work.

"I like to be an agitator, and to draw people into the democratic process," says Michael Ramirez, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times. "The bottom line is getting readers thinking and involved."

Political cartoonists have a long history of stirring the pot to create and illuminate controversy (see page 13). And, as you'll see this year, nothing gets their creative juices flowing like the colorful personalities and hot issues Of a presidential election campaign.

We asked four prominent cartoonists how they view the 2000 campaign so far, and what evidence they have that the pen really can be mightier than the sword.

Mike Smith

Mike Smith has advice for kids who want to cartoon for a living.

"Be a geek," says Smith, who draws for the Las Vegas Sun. "I think all political cartoonists started out as doodlers and geeks. We were in band, not football. I played the trumpet. It could have been worse. I could have played the clarinet."

Smith considers himself "an equal-opportunity offender. There's so much blame going around that if I'm criticizing just one end of the spectrum, I feel like I'm only doing 50 percent of my job."

That means Democrat Bill Bradley ("The way I draw him, he looks like a zucchini," Smith says) gets as much criticism as former Republican candidate Steve Forbes ("He looks like a vampire, like he just stepped in from the set of The Lost Boys. ")

Like most cartoonists, Smith reads mountains of newspapers and stays glued to the TV in search of ideas. Once he has a theme, he draws his picture around it.

Smith often hears from readers who think his work is cruel, but he says he doesn't mean to hurt anyone. Besides, he says, cartoonists cannot censor themselves to please others. "I never say that something is too mean to draw or some idea is too controversial to attack," he says. "Hey, a political cartoonist pushes the envelope. He affects everybody differently--which is fine, as long as you're affected."

Marie Woolf

Marie Woolf's earliest memory is of "wrecking" a Yogi Bear book by changing Yogi into a girl.

"I was challenging the status quo at 3," she says.

Woolf and her drawings are still shaking things up today. Woolf is one of only four female syndicated political cartoonists in the country. "I must have a defective gene or something," she says, laughing. "Little girls are not encouraged to be politically astute."

But that's one stereotype Woolf is intent on breaking. After drawing for her high school and college papers, Woolf produced work that appeared in many newspapers across the country, like the Chicago Sun-Times, the Portland Oregonian, and the Oakland Tribune. Most recently, she created cartoons for a Web site connected to Senator Orrin Hatch's now-ended presidential bid.

"There was a bit of a conflict there," she says of her status as an independent-minded journalist working for a conservative politician. "But he didn't tie my hands."

Woolf's drawings have a harder edge than most, because she thinks cartoons should be more than jokes. "The uniqueness of this form is that it can reduce complex issues to a really powerful single visual punch," she says.

For Woolf, a great drawing begins with a great schnoz. "You start your caricature with the nose, then you build around it," she says. "Clinton has a great nose. George W. [Bush]--great nose. Dan Quayle was very tough for me. No nose at all."

Michael Ramirez

The phone in Michael Ramirez's Los Angeles Times office never stops ringing. Usually, it's a complaint about one of his cartoons, which run in the Times and 400 other newspapers around the country. "I'm hated all around the world," he jokes. "Normally you have to be a Communist dictator to achieve those levels of hatred."

But to Ramirez, making people angry--or happy, or inspired--is the point. "Anything I can do to draw the reader into an issue," he says, "I'll do it." Sometimes that means drawing President Clinton with a Pinocchio-like nose that grows as he addresses the American public, or showing Republican contender George W. Bush flunking an IQ test.

Ramirez likes to keep his cartoons edgy. "I am a real believer that a cartoon should always be poignant and make a statement," he says. At the same time, it doesn't hurt to get a reader laughing. "By using humor, you facilitate the ability to get your message across to a large audience," he says. "If you catch a reader's eye or make him laugh, he's hooked. He can't help but get the message."

To Ramirez, campaigns offer the opportunity to work on a broad canvas. "It's like Christmas all year round," he says. "There's so much to make fun of, it's hard to know where to start."

Tom Tomorrow

Tom Tomorrow's work stands out in a crowd. And it's not just because of his bizarre pen name. (Shhh! His real name is Dan Perkins.) Tomorrow's cartoons are known as much for their look as for their content. "My style is one that people either love or hate," he says. "Younger people seem to like it. Older people just kind of scratch their heads and don't get it."

This Modern World, a strip that runs in more than 130 newspapers, has a deliberately kitschy 1950s look. But producing it is a modern technological feat. While many cartoonists still draw their panels by hand, Tomorrow manipulates photographs on computers. "I subtly accentuate things like, say, Clinton's pudginess, to make them represent his personality more," he says.

As a social commentator, Tomorrow draws inspiration from a variety of sources. "You have to pay attention to MTV as well as read the newspapers," he says. The point is to defy conventional wisdom--and show that things are often not what they seem. "It's my job to be cynical," he says.

His strong points of view have cost him staff jobs at the magazines U.S. News and World Report and Brill's Content, but Tomorrow takes the firings as, well, a kind of compliment. "If everyone loved my work," he says, "it would mean I was being too safe and sanitary."

Past Masters

Cartoonists like TOM TOMORROW weren't born yesterday. Their pens have been scratching out pointed political images-and making enemies-throughout the nation's 224-year history. Before there was an Internet, TV, radio, or even many newspapers, there were political cartoons.

The early cartoons didn't pull punches, either. In a drawing titled "Mad Tom in a Rage", an unknown artist pictured Thomas Jefferson as a brandy-soaked anarchist pulling down the federal government, with an assist from Satan. In the style of the time, dialogue streamed out of the speakers' lips in script.

By the mid-19th century, with the rise of daily newspapers, cartoons became more influential. THOMAS NAST (1840-1902), perhaps the nation's most powerful cartoonist ever, supported the Northern cause in the Civil War (1861-1865) with the cartoons he drew for the newspaper Harper's Weekly. After the war, his images helped to bring down the notorious New York political boss William M. Tweed. Nast drew Tweed in prison stripes-a pictorial prophecy that soon came true.

It was Nast who created the Republican elephant and popularized the Democratic donkey, political symbols that remain instantly recognizable today. The two beasts appeared together for the first time in 1880. Nast is also credited with the invention of the character Uncle Sam, as well as the fat, modern version of Santa Claus.

In the 20th century, cartoonists had fun with Theodore Roosevelt's spectacles, Franklin D. Roosevelt's cigarette holder, and John F. Kennedy's bushy hair. They also proved that their medium could be as effective in a moment of tragedy as it was in political warfare. BILL MAULDIN's simple drawing of the Lincoln Memorial's statue of Lincoln with his head in his hands spoke volumes about the nation's grief following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.

Cartoonists HERBERT BLOCK ("Herblock") of the Washington Post and PAT OLIPHANT of the Denver Post helped shape popular attitudes toward the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. So did GARRY TRUDEAU's Doonesbury, which has gotten under the skin of Presidents starting with Richard Nixon (below, from 1973). Former President Bush, whom Trudeau viciously satirized as empty space, once said, "I wanted to go up and kick the hell out of him." For Trudeau, as it would have been for legions of cartoonists before him, that was probably the finest compliment.

--Timothy Kelley