Most artists will tell you that creativity isn’t some switch you simply flip, that creativity is often an unpredictable and spontaneous muse. Imagine then if, as an artist, you knew that five days every week, you would have to stare at an empty box, ponder the day’s news or events, and somehow create a statement of that day — in both pictures and words — that would give people reason to pause, reflect, discuss, laugh or even debate. How celebrated editorial cartoonist and children’s book author Doug MacGregor lives his life of creativity. outside the box. Such is the life of an editorial cartoonist and, here in Southwest Florida, that editorial cartoonist goes by the signature MacGregor — as in Doug MacGregor of the News- Press. From 1988 to 2011, MacGregor was full-time editorial cartoonist for Gannett’s Fort Myers newspaper, where he penned close to 6,000 cartoons, worked a weekly Florida lifestyle comic strip called “Sunny Side Up” for 10 years, won a bunch of Florida newspaper awards, was named “Best of Gannett” cartoonists nationwide about a dozen times, and was even summoned to Washington, D.C. to fill in at USA Today . And you’d have to do it by six pm. And you’d do it for more than 30 years.
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