By Derf Backderf
My work for The Lantern almost got me tarred and feathered on the Oval.
In addition to serving as a reporter, copy editor and photographer, I was the political cartoonist from 1981 to 1983, smack in the middle of the paper’s remarkable run of cartoonists who went on to significant professional success. Newspaper comics was my chosen profession. Journalism studies was a means to that end.
You all no doubt remember the disgraced Buckeye football star Art Schlichter. An All-American quarterback, and the face of Buckeye football for his four triumphant years. In April 1983, after a terrible rookie year with the Baltimore Colts, he was nailed in a gambling sting. Eventually, he was thrown out of the NFL. It was THE sports scandal of the year and a shocking fall from grace. In what I thought was an obvious attempt to escape charges, he turned in his bookies to the FBI.
This prompted me to draw a cartoon where Schlichter met a Sopranos-like end for being a stoolie. Tasteless? Certainly. Inappropriate? For a traditional paper like The Lantern, definitely. I turned in the cartoon, naively, with no qualms. None of the editors voiced an objection. Off it went to press.
Shit, meet fan.
The next day In my morning history class, I noticed some students were glaring at me. Strange, I thought. The next class, more glares. Someone yelled at me as I walked across the Oval. I have no idea how he knew who I was. I jogged the rest of the way to the Journalism Building, a nervous lump growing in my stomach.
I walked into the newsroom . . . and was showered with boos and wadded up balls of paper! Turns out the phones had been ringing off the hook since dawn with complaints from outraged Buckeye fans! It got worse from there. Columbus TV sportscasters waved copies of my cartoon and ranted their disapproval. Even the national sports media weighed in. I unplugged the phone in my apartment to silence the incessant threatening calls. Out of caution, I hid out at my girlfriend’s house for a few days. The OSU athletic director called J-School Director Walter Bunge and demanded that I be sacked from The Lantern. Several of the journalism faculty wanted me gone, too, I’m sorry to say. Luckily, I had faculty allies like Dr. John Clarke in my corner. “A cartoonist is supposed to piss people off!” he growled to me, with a chuckle. “That’s the job!” God, I worshipped that man. I was mere months from graduation, so the decision was made to leave me be, since I’d soon be out of their hair.
I dare say it’s the most controversial cartoon in Lantern history. Unfortunately, it’s not a good cartoon. At age 22, I didn’t understand that addiction is not a moral failing, but a destructive mental illness. Society as a whole hadn’t yet accepted that in 1983, when we were in the shadow of the cocaine-fueled Studio 54 era. Drug addiction was barely acknowledged, let alone something like gambling. It’s a cartoon “of its time,” and not one I would have penned a year or two later, after I acquired just a little more life experience.
Strange as it sounds, until this cartoon and its aftermath I never thought much about the massive degree of chutzpah it took to be a Lantern cartoonist. I walked in off the street, a 20-year-old rube from small-town Ohio, and arrogantly displayed my amateur cartoons in front of 35,000 readers without a moment’s hesitation. I don’t know where that fearlessness, or perhaps recklessness, came from. That was the gift of The Lantern. It was where I was first published. It’s where I first found my voice. What the Schlichter Affair taught me: say what you mean, craft it carefully, and stand your ground. It was a lesson, while taking heavy fire from all directions, that served me very well later as a professional.
As for Schlichter, he became a serial criminal and left a long trail of victims he swindled out of millions to feed his addiction. He spent most of the next decades in and out of prison. I doubt any of the readers who demanded my head in 1983 would offer a similar defense of him now. As Ben Bradlee said in All the President’s Men: “I screwed up … but I wasn’t wrong.”
Editor’s Note: John “Derf” Backderf graduated in 1983. His comic strip appeared in The Village Voice and 150 other similar alternative weekly papers for 24 years. He was the recipient of a Robert F. Kennedy Award for political satire. He is the author of nine graphic novels, including the international bestseller, My Friend Dahmer, which was made into a feature film in 2016. His books have been translated into 16 languages and have won numerous comics and literature awards in the U.S. and Europe.
