By Victor Greto
NEWARK — There’s something cock-eyed about the way Rob Tornoe looks at things.
His eyes, oblique behind black-framed glasses, reflexively play at everything in front of them, from the lines that make up a politician’s profile to the dozen ideas performing goofy somersaults in his head.
We’re talking cock-eyed metaphorically, not literally.
“You know what I always wanted to do?” says Tornoe, a 30-year-old editorial cartoonist who grinds out nearly a dozen cartoons a week for a politics-centered Web site based in New Jersey.
“A graphic novel about Benedict Arnold. I love Benedict Arnold.”
See?
Normally, people shy away from Arnold the way they shy away from Aaron Burr, another Revolutionary War figure whose exploits aren’t considered as sterling as, say, the marble-encrusted George Washington’s.
But Arnold, the traitor?
“It’s always interesting to see a guy who appeared to make a change” — that would be changing sides during the war — “but who always was the same guy.”
That would be the guy who was an overachiever, who tried to overcome the pain of an alcoholic father, and who decisively won the war’s turning-point battle of Saratoga.
Tornoe likes characters. Ideologies and beliefs are interesting, but it is individuals and what motivates them that interest him the most.
“You have to have a certain turn of mind to be an editorial cartoonist,” says Jimmy Margulies, an award-winning, nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist who works at The Record in Bergen County, N.J.
“There are many who can draw well. But to have the capacity to look at things with a skewed eye and find the ridicule and the ability to make ironic comments — that’s very limited.”
It’s a trait Tornoe developed over an apprenticeship that took him from his youth as an Air Force brat to Dover, where he graduated from high school, to a stillborn career as an accountant and personnel manager, to a freelance hawker of his cartoons.
“If we’re going to win a Pulitzer, it’s going to be about Rob,” says his boss, James Pindell, the 29-year-old managing editor of Politicker.com, where Tornoe recently began to work full time, and for whom he grinds out a dozen cartoons a week.
“Cartoons are something that we always had a personal affinity for. It drives coverage and gets an audience, and our political junkies love it. Which is what this is all about.”
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Tornoe wasn’t all that sure what he wanted to be when he was a kid. But he always liked to draw.
Born in Idaho, his family moved with its Air Force father shortly after to Nevada, then Dover, then Oklahoma, before returning to Dover when Tornoe reached the ninth grade.
“It was boring, maybe,” Tornoe says of adolescent life in Dover. “But it was better than Oklahoma.” He became an Eagle Scout, and spent much of his spare time drawing.
All his advanced-placement courses were art-related, and instead of filling out his high school schedule taking study halls, he went to open classes in the art studio.
Tornoe always liked comic books, but he didn’t like drawing superheroes.
“I liked real things,” he says, like people, or animals, or things he knew from his father, including planes and space ships — not the Star Trek type, but the Voyager spacecraft kind.
He took a year off after high school, and decided to attend DelTech where he obtained business management and accounting degrees.
At the same time, he started working for Happy Harry’s, first as a cashier, and then in the accounting department.
A staunch conservative at the time, Tornoe debated the issues with a liberal supervisor who each day brought in newspapers during the hotly-contested Bush-Gore 2000 presidential election.
Tornoe was soon transferred to the personnel department to help with recruiting.
“I liked the problem solving, but I grew to hate it,” he says.
Reading employment applications that teetered on the absurd — one guy answered the question about a prior arrest record by confessing to an auto theft in which he wasn’t caught — soon pushed him away.
Besides, he always wanted to learn to draw better, so he decided to attend the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in Dover, N.J. He was 25.
After the first year at school, he began picking up caricature jobs, as well as graphic artist positions.
“I always loved politics, but never thought of doing cartoons about it,” he says.
But, by his third year at the school, he began drawing political cartoons and submitting them to newspapers.
After The Press of Atlantic City accepted some, other good-sized papers began to take them, including NJBiz and the New Brunswick Sentinel.
He met Margulies during his third year at the school.
“He reached out to a few editorial cartoonists in New Jersey to get advice and encouragement, so he came up to my office and we went out for lunch and he struck me as a nice guy,” Margulies says. “We stayed in touch.”
But after graduating from the cartoon school, he wanted to return to Delaware. He had bought a townhouse while he worked at Happy Harry’s. He moved back to Newark.
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The more he drew, caricatured and skewered New Jersey politicians, the more Tornoe began to politically shift to the middle of the road.
Unlike many his age, Tornoe says his day is filled with reading ink-fresh newspapers, from the New York Times to the News Journal, as well as online Web sites.
“It’s really important for a cartoonist to have the facts and know the news,” says Carla Linz, editorial page editor at The Press of Atlantic City, which buys Tornoe’s cartoons regularly.
“What I look for is subjective,” she says. “The syndicated cartoonists know the news, and with the local cartoonists you want someone who really reads the newspapers and can process the news. There has to be a point.”
The political cartoonist has to be able to skewer the powers that be, no matter who they are, she says.
“He hits both sides,” Linz says. “Locally, I think that is a strength. You don’t want to be just bashing one side. Right now, the Democrats are in power and they get a little more.”
But it’s not always about the politics.
“I slam them because they’re wrong or stupid,” Tornoe says about those he skewers. “It’s got nothing to do with ideology. I’m an equal-opportunity offender.”
Tornoe began freelancing for a Web site called PoliticsNJ.com, a politics-only site that focused on the often manic political scene in the Garden State.
The site began in 2000, was bought a year ago by the Observer Media Group, whose flagship paper is publisher Jared Kushner’s New York Observer.
The New Jersey site was so successful, the owners decided to expand.
Under the general Web site, www.politicker.com, the company now covers 13 states, including Arizona, California, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Oregon. Delaware is still only a gleam in its eye.
Pindell, the site’s managing editor, ascribes a good chunk of his Web sites’ success to Tornoe.
“When he has a cartoon up that is pretty successful, we can see twice the number of page-viewer traffic on the site,” he says. “It’s that powerful.”
Since he was hired in February to work on the Web sites full-time, Tornoe grinds out about a dozen cartoons a week.
His research necessarily concentrates more on local state politics than on national issues.
On alternate days, he jumps from researching issues and drawing for east and west coast states. If the papers or Web sites do not give him enough information, he’ll consult with Pindell or the sites’ 15 reporters.
New Jersey has provided the most prolific fodder for cartoons. Because New Jersey started the Politicker brand, it remains its biggest Web site. Tornoe also continues to freelance for New Jersey newspapers.
He works out of his Newark town home, smack between his employer’s Manhattan and Washington DC offices.
He has yet to run out of ideas.
“It’s cool learning stuff about all these states,” he says.
He sketches out ideas on his drawing board, scans them into his computer, and colors them there.
He discusses many ideas with Pindell.
“We talk about some ideas, and he’ll do some rough sketches — all over e-mail,” Pindell says. “Then I’ll say, ‘I don’t know about that,’ or ‘What if we used this word?’ or, ‘Could you label that person for readers?’”
Tornoe’s creativity thrives on free association, but is rooted firmly in politics.
Although there are fewer than 100 full-time working editorial cartoonists in the country, Tornoe borders on the tantalizing unique.
“I’m 56,” said syndicated editorial cartoonist Jimmy Margulies. “There are some older editorial cartoonists, and some in their 40s, but only a few from Rob’s generation. Many of the people closer in age to Rob are alternative cartoonists, in Village Voice-type publications and underground newspapers. Their work is different, multi-paneled and wordy.
Like Tornoe, Margulies is “more of a fan of mainstream cartooning. It’s the old adage, brevity is the soul of wit.”
That’s Polonius’ line, from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” He’s the blowhard that Hamlet made fun of, and who ends up gutted and dead in the Queen’s bedchamber at Hamlet’s hands.
For editorial cartoonists, the irony never ends.