He's lost in the nineteenth century, bald as a cucumber and has more teeth than Jimmy Carter. Not only that, Ben Sargent dresses weird; he sports waistcoats with pocket watches, wears bow ties, braces and the occasional derby. He's wild as an outhouse rat about steam trains, Texas history and turn-of-the-century printing presses. And, politically, he's as pink and populist as they come.

That's a portrait of Sargent according to his colleague and political foil Bill DeOre, of Dallas Morning News fame.

Sargent is in the business of editorial cartooning, and as an equal-opportunity lampooner for the past thirty years, the Pulitzer-Prize winner knows that any public figure is bound to get his. And since Sargent himself is quite public—his cartoon has been in the Austin American-Statesman since 1974 and is syndicated in more than forty newspapers in the United States—there it is: Bill DeOre, Big D's ultra-conservative editorial cartoonist, skewering his old buddy, the liberal, literate gentleman from the capital city.

"He's crazy for what he says," DeOre proclaims gleefully, playing Tucker Carlson to Sargent's Paul Begala—the political sparring partners on CNN's Crossfire. "But I'll defend his right to say it with my life," DeOre says, adding, almost under his breath, "Actually, I have an amazing amount of respect for Ben as a person and for the work he does. And when he's a friend to you, he's a friend. Even if he is a commie."

Pow, right in the kisser. But Sargent can handle the right-wing roundhouse delivered just so. He expects criticism, just as his subjects should.

Over the past three decades, in the Statesman, The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, Minneapolis Star Tribune and other newspapers, the courtly caricaturist with the left-handed jab has pulled no punches on his victims—be they George W. Bush (who he calls "monkey boy" and portrays as a chimp in many cartoons) or Ann Richards (most recall his Ann of the towering white doo); Rick Perry (just think hair and air) or Carole Keeton Strayhorn (usually grandmotherly or bearing yet another new last name).

"Editorial cartooning is by nature a negative medium," says Sargent, who is tall, affable and, yes, quite bald. "If you do a positive cartoon about something or someone, it comes across almost like a poster. If you want to give an optimistic perspective, you do that by attacking the other side."

It's all in a day's work for the self-taught artist, who won the 1982 Pulitzer for editorial cartooning and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2001 and 2002.

Rendered with fountain pen and "inked" with sable brush, the finely detailed works appear in the Statesman five days a week—every day but Saturday and Monday. And whether readers love Ben Sargent or love to hate him, no one can deny that he is an Austin icon, a powerful national voice—and, given the current political climate, maybe an endangered species.

Sargent is nothing if not tenacious. Though his home newspaper, the Statesman endorsed George W. Bush for president in the last election, Sargent soldiered on with his lampoons of the Republican party and the country's commander in chief, illustrating that even if an editorial board doesn't always agree with its cartoonist, it's the job of opinion journalists to tell their personal truth. Or in Sargent's case, to draw it. And the Statesman deserves credit for allowing a diversity of opinion in its editorial pages, especially in matters as sensitive as who gets the daily's endorsement for president.

"As a newspaper journalist, you're professionally obligated to be fair, accurate, complete and balanced. But there are two pages in the back of the paper where we're obligated to be fair, accurate and complete—but we don't have to be 'balanced,'" the fifty-six-year-old career newspaper man says. "I'm not a pollster. To me, you're obligated as an opinion journalist to express your views no matter what the politics of the day. If you don't, then people will say, 'Why should I read what this guy's saying? He doesn't even know where he stands?' That makes your position as an opinion journalist kind of useless."

Ever the contrarian, Sargent seems almost to embody Austin, an island of blue in a sea of red. Like the majority in the capital city, he leans decidedly left, and his interests tend toward the little guy versus big business, states' rights and the Bill of Rights versus federal mandates and Constitutional amendments. No doubt, if someone like Ben Sargent could come from the "red" sea that is Texas, it would have to be Austin that spawned him.

When Texas was blue

Not quite, actually. As Sargent explains over a cup at downtown Austin's Little City Espresso Bar & Café, time was when Texas was "blue." Even West Texas, he declares, his pate and prophets-of-old beard shaded by a dove-gray cowboy hat. And anyone who knows the real Ben Sargent, the gentlemanly person behind the "poison pen," knows that he's a branded-in-cowhide West Texan. Sixth generation. His people hail from Fort Worth and Amarillo, the state's true west, where his granddaddy was a cotton buyer, and his parents were newspaper folk.

"Both of my parents worked for the Amarillo Globe-News," the cartoonist says of Joseph and Dorothy Sargent. "Both were politically active. They were liberal Democrats. In fact, in those days, Potter County was always sending liberal Democrats to the Legislature. There was a big zinc smelter there, and it was a big railroad town…People forget that until the discovery of oil, Texas was one of the most liberal states in the Union. This may have been where Populism started."

Although Louisianans and Bill DeOre (who went to school in West Texas) might disagree—and some historians would point out that Texas was pro-slavery in the Civil War and a KKK stronghold in the nineteen-forties, and thus not a "blanket" liberal state—the fact is that Sargent was and is a product of his environment. And that environment was filled with journalists and yellow-dog Democrats. From the time he can remember, political awareness pervaded his childhood. Around the family dinner table, Roosevelt and Kennedy were gods, he recalls.

But as much as politics shaped young Ben Sargent, so did his father's passion for newspapers, printing and the printed word. Throughout his life, the elder Sargent worked for newspapers, reporting in Borger, Texas, and selling ads for the Globe-News, retiring from that paper in his mid-sixties. In addition, Joe's stepmother (Ben's grandmother) was a cousin of Stuart Long, who started the Long News Service. Newspaper was literally in Ben's blood. Perhaps it's no coincidence that he later married Diane Holloway, the Statesman's TV critic.

"I never knew about any other kind of work," he says. "I just assumed I'd be a reporter."

By the age of fourteen, the younger Sargent was working summers at the Globe-News, first as a dispatch-runner shuttling ads to advertisers for approval, then as a proofreader. After graduating high school in 1966, he jumped into journalism school at Amarillo College, earning an associate's degree, then enrolled at the University of Texas' journalism school. At UT, he reported for The Daily Texan and worked part-time operating a letterpress (hand-set metal type), then worked one summer for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times before moving on to Long News Service. After graduation, he joined Long's capital bureau full-time. From the ages of twenty to twenty-four, he hopscotched between Long News Service, United Press International (UPI) and the Statesman, covering politics and the Texas Legislature.

When he finally settled at the Statesman in 1971, he was all of twenty-four. It was there and then that politics, journalism and a knack for drawing coalesced.

"I was reporting at the Statesman, and I was doing little maps and graphs here and there. At that time I was the only artist in the building! So I did everything. I had always been interested in drawing editorial cartoons and, after a while, it got to where that was all I did. I kind of fell into it. Cartoonists of that vintage, that's usually how they got into it," Sargent says.

In those early days, he set his sights on now-classic Texas political icons, who for better or worse have become part of the state's lore and lexicon: Governor Dolph Briscoe, US Senator John Tower, Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby, Governor Mark White and, the first Republican elected Texas governor since Reconstruction (gasp), Bill Clements.

A collection of Sargent's first years as an editorial cartoonist—Texas Statehouse Blues—was published by Texas Monthly Press in 1980. Four years later, in 1984, Big Brother Blues was released—a compilation that focused more on national issues and was heavy on Reagan—era cartoons, also published by Texas Monthly Press.

In fine print on the latter's copyright page, Sargent noted, "Although the concept of this book was inspired by the works of George Orwell, it is not authorized by him or his Estate. It should not be confused with his novel 1984 and is not associated with the motion picture 1984 or any remake."

Sargent as watchdog, artist, champion and villain

From the outset, Sargent has been a watchdog against Big Brother, but when comparing his earlier cartoons to his latest work, it's easy to see the maturation of a talented satirist into a truly top-flight editorial cartoonist.

Style-wise and as a craftsman, Sargent is a hero to many of his contemporaries, including Pulitzer Prize winner Clay Bennett, editorial cartoonist for the Christian Science Monitor.

"I wouldn't want Ben after me. He's as good as it gets, and especially on local politics there in Texas," observes Bennett, who is based in Boston. "He lets them have it with both barrels."

But what really sets Sargent apart, Bennett says, is a certain something. "Ben's stuff is like nobody else's. Very few people in this business can say their work is as unique as Ben Sargent's is. You could recognize it from a football field away."

The forty-five-year-old cartoonist says he became good friends with Sargent through the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, for which Sargent was vice president from 1986-1988 and president in 1988-89. Himself a hotshot, Bennett, who won the Pulitzer in 2002 and has been a finalist four times, expresses the utmost respect for Sargent as a craftsman and artist.

"When you spend five or six hours every day on a cartoon, like Ben does, that's very unusual. Just coming up with an idea is the lion's share of the day for most of us. But add five or six hours onto that for just execution of the drawing—it's a daunting prospect. I just marvel at Ben's abilities as a draftsman."

Those abilities go well beyond the detailed backgrounds or the dense cross-hatching that often enrich Sargent's cartoons. "There's a dime a dozen who do that," Bennett says. "(Pat) Oliphant and (Jeff) McNelly and those guys brought in that kind of style, and it's been emulated by everyone coming into the ranks, especially in my generation. With Ben, you can see a little of (R.) Crumb, a little bit of these sort of underground comic-book guys—but only a little bit. There's nobody that really dominates his work. It's his own, which is what you can only hope for as an artist."

One thing that consistently stands out about Sargent's works is his oddly shaped, sometimes anthropomorphic characters, the supporting cast, his sort of Everyman figures. Meanwhile, his prime targets—the crooked or arrogant politician, the wayward or greedy public servant—are immediately recognizable in some exaggerated, slightly freakish way. His Bill Clements in the eighties, Dolph Briscoe in the seventies and eighties, and of course, his Ronald Reagan throughout the eighties are all perfect examples of the Sargent treatment.

Over the years, however, no politician has received more of his attention than President George W. Bush. As a result, the W caricature has evolved significantly.

"Since I'm from Texas, I've been drawing him for years—before everyone else was. When he was the President's son, I'd drawn him as a little boy, and after he became a governor, my wife Diane said, 'You ought to draw him as a grown-up.'"

But Sargent has never stopped caricaturing Bush to incorporate a certain…chimpish quality.

With a mischievous grin, the cartoonist tells of when an observer asked, "'When are you going to stop making Bush look like a chimp?' I said, 'I don't make Bush look like a chimp. Almighty God made him look like a chimp!'"

Actually, Sargent says, the Bush family has always been very cordial to him. When he did a cartoon on W when Bush still owned the Texas Rangers, the younger George dropped him a line complimenting his work. And when the cartoonist won the Pulitzer in 1982, the elder George, then vice president, sent him a congratulatory note—even though much of that award-winning material had skewered the Reagan administration and its policies.

Professional politicians know they're fair game for editorial satirists and they should expect it, Sargent believes. If the Bushes haven't liked some of his cartoons over the years (likely, 99.9 percent of them), he says, they've been professional enough and well mannered enough not to let him know it.

But Sargent doesn't always lambaste his political subjects. Former Texas Governor Ann Richards, though portrayed with exaggerated features, usually got a pass from Sargent, who admits that he generally liked Richards' policies.

As the firebrand former guv says, "It's a joy to have Ben Sargent's attention, and it's an honor…He usually portrayed me as the equivalent of the ten-thousand-pound gorilla, not literally or physically but figuratively. In his cartoons, I always looked a little tougher and more muscular than I actually felt."

Along with many public officials, Governor Richards owns several Sargent originals.

"I just bought one the other night at a benefit (mid-November). It was a cartoon for me to give to my daughter," Richards says. "It had a Republican elephant trunk coming in under a window about to snare a woman's right. It was directed at reproductive freedom." A particularly timely topic, she and many others feel, with the president expected to potentially nominate Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade.

Most of Richards' other Sargent originals are in her archives at the University of Texas.

Other politicians who've bought originals over the years include Dolph Briscoe, Bob Bullock, Bill Clements, Rick Perry and Carole Keeton Strayhorn, to name a few.

Sargent recalls that members of former President Bill Clinton's staff purchased a cartoon or two for their boss, though he doesn't remember which cartoons. And he was surprised to learn recently—from his eighteen-year-old son, Sam, who is a freshman at Boston University and visited the office of US Representative Tom DeLay (R-Houston) in DC not long ago—that the house majority leader has a few of his cartoons (not originals) on the walls.

"Apparently at least he has a sense of humor about it," Sargent says, referring to his relentless lambasting of DeLay and his Texas congressional redistricting shenanigans. Sargent has also unsheathed his pen on DeLay regarding his relationship to three political associates indicted for illegally flowing corporate money into 2002 Republican campaigns for the Texas House.

Sargent recollects another situation in which the subject did not, in the final analysis, find his cartoons humorous.

"I remember when Bill Clements became governor…and he knew that Dolph Briscoe had about fifty or sixty of my cartoons, and I guess Clements thought that he was supposed to do that, too—that that's what governors do, collect editorial cartoons of themselves," the artist says, chuckling. And so, not long after Clements was elected, someone from the governor's office called Sargent to make a purchase.

"I sold him about a half-dozen or so, and I didn't hear anything for a while, and then one day they all reappeared on my desk in a big envelope from the governor's office. Apparently the cartoon I'd done the day before had so pissed him off that he decided to send the whole collection back and tell me where I could stick them!"

Apparently, the negative feedback and enraged letter-writers don't get to Sargent too much. When he's reading the daily papers or watching the evening news, pondering ideas and mulling over the day's injustices, he never forgets that the nature of his work is all about challenging the status quo. Thus he has to follow his gut or his sense of outrage rather than worry what the reader will think.

"It's a real mysterious process," he says of the conceptual phase of his cartoons. "It's a lot of elements coming together in your head. If there's one thing that brings it on when you're reading the news it's…(he thinks a moment). Well, what you're looking for is something that jumps out at you. Herblock (the pen name of Herbert Block, who has drawn political cartoons for The Washington Post since 1946) once said he gets an idea when he sits down and looks at the Post until he reads something and exclaims, 'They can't do that!' And there's your idea."

That's pretty much how it happens for Sargent.

The other side of Sargent

As sharp as his pen and wit may be, there is a soft side to Ben Sargent, his friends and family say, a considerate, conventional, old-style-chivalry behind the Winston-Newton sable brush. And as much as he is of the times, conveying his views on current events, his wife and son say he is almost a man out of time—an almost wistful dreamer figure who easily could have lived in the nineteenth century.

"The weird thing to me about Ben Sargent is that people who just know him from his cartoon, I think, assume he's going to be an angry radical type in person, when in fact he's very soft-spoken, very sensitive and very sweet," says Holloway, Sargent's second wife and mother of his second child, Sam. (He has an older daughter, Elizabeth, twenty-four, who teaches fifth grade in the North Texas city of Flower Mound.)

"He's also got this sort of old-fashioned way about him. He's the kind of person that opens doors and pulls out chairs. The interesting thing to me is how that's sort of bled over into his cartoons. He has very old-fashioned manners, and so I think he has a real problem making women in his cartoons look unattractive. He has no problem making Rick Perry look silly. But when Ann Richards was governor, he had a real hard time drawing her in a critical way. I think a lot of that was caught up in his sort of gentlemanly approach to women."

Holloway also says that Sargent is profoundly spiritual. A glance at the books in his Statesman office and at home reinforces the fact. He clearly loves the writings of acclaimed American spiritual writer Thomas Merton, and he keeps different versions of the Old and New Testament at hand for reference and reflection.

"I think that surprises people. They think Ben's this fire-breathing atheistic heathen!" Holloway says. "But he's a lay minister in the Episcopalian church. He's deeply religious."

Perhaps an unlikely fan of Sargent is State Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, who says that although the cartoonist is nationally acclaimed, he's a caring and involved citizen of Austin.

"I remember Ben working hard on the Austin Steam Train Association" (which Sargent helped to launch in the early nineties, and which today runs scenic trips from Austin and Cedar Park through the Hill Country and back). "That was his baby," Strayhorn says, adding, "He really has a civic conscience. He's always active for good causes."

She jokes that not all of them are causes she agrees with. "I think you can say—and there are many who do—that his editorial cartoons are 'priceless.' I know that they do have a price-tag (they're two hundred dollars a pop) because I purchased a couple of his originals just to get them out of circulation." Strayhorn quips. "I think Ben is a capital city icon, a Texas classic—agree or disagree with him. He has an incredible amount of humor, intelligence and caring."

Something else that his friends know about Sargent, but few of his readers would know, is that he's an avid letterpress aficionado who has hand-printed-the old-fashioned way, composing each page letter-by-letter and sentence-by-sentence-four small, specialty books. All were done lovingly on his father's 1903 Chandler & Price platen press, in a shop behind his and Holloway's South Austin home.

One book is a collection of poems and songs about the American railroad. One is a reproduction of Mark Twain's "The War Prayer" ("I did it as a cry out before Bush invaded Iraq. It didn't help," Sargent says). One is a selection of hymns and prayers of Saint Thomas Aquinas, translated from the Latin by his Statesman colleague Bill Womack. And one is a "specimen book" of the type and ornaments that make up his astounding collection of letterpress type. Combining his father's and uncle's collections (both men were gifted letterpress "job work" men), Sargent has approximately two hundred forty-four fonts—all of which are tucked into narrow wooden type cases in his shop.

Indeed, inside that shop is where the private, "old-fashioned" Ben Sargent toils. When the tall, gangly artist disappears into his sanctuary, a stone's throw from the family swimming pool and shaded by towering old magnolias, it's as if he has slipped through a "wormhole," stepped into a time warp. His bow tie and braces are in sync with the surroundings. Inside is the eighteen-hundred-pound Chandler & Price platen press his father purchased in the nineteen-sixties, its cast-iron wheel ready to roll. The smell of printer's ink and thick paper scents the air. Running along two walls is an HO scale model (one eighty-seventh scale) of the Chili Line narrow-gauge railroad in New Mexico, a steam-train line that once ran from Antonito to Santa Fe.

The shop represents Sargent's twin passions, railroads and letterpresses, two interests that have followed him since he was a child.

Growing up in Amarillo, where a number of rail lines converged, he recalls trains wailing past on the Rock Island track just a half a block away from the Sargents' home, whisking his boy's imagination along with it, and he recalls one summer when his parents took him and his younger brother Ed (a long-time copy editor at The Dallas Morning News) to Colorado to ride the Durango-Silverton narrow-gauge stream train. Inspired by those early memories, he's devoted a good deal of his private time to collecting model train and steam-train memorabilia—not to mention countless volunteer hours helping Arthur Boone and others launch the Austin & Texas Central Railroad (the Austin Steam Train Association's operating name).

"I never dreamed I'd be running a steam train one day," Sargent says of his role as chairman of the board of the Austin Stream Train Association. "I was kind of in on the whole project from the kitchen table stage, when people first started talking about doing it in 1989."

The steam train is one of the few things Sargent will boast about. He brings up topics like his Pulitzer or his friends (and foes) in high places only when asked, but the steam train is, as Strayhorn said, "his baby."

Another portion of his life, he has given over to learning the trade that his father loved so much.

"My dad had always been a printer but he took it up full-time after he retired from the newspaper in Amarillo," Ben says. Joe Sargent became a "job work" printer, someone who does specialty print jobs such as invitations, stationery, posters, calling cards and wedding announcements. And according to Ben, few high-society events were held in Amarillo without the printing services of Joe Sargent and his trusty Chandler & Price.

The cartoonist obviously takes pride in the fact that he is continuing a family tradition: Inside each of his hand-printed books, the title page bears the print shop name used by his dad and uncle: Sargent Brothers.

He knows the ink stains go well below his skin and that paper is part of his soul's bedrock. Something about the printed page—paper and ink, words and lines, the old-fashioned way of communicating—grabbed Ben Sargent from an early age and has yet to let go. He can't quite explain it.

His son, Sam, has a theory: his father has a simple but fierce love for his country, the history of it and the preservation of its core premises.

"If anyone has taught me about America and what it stands for, it would be my dad," says Sam, who, like his father, has the political fire in his belly and who last summer worked on the reelection campaign for US Representative Lloyd Doggett (D-Austin).

"Even though everyday in his work he covers a different issue, the basis does not change…It's about the basics of democracy in this country. He's not really going after people. He's not looking to be sensational or to destroy someone. I think he's trying to protect something. For some reason, he seems to understand this country very well, what it's about and what it's always been about…There's a quality about him that's timeless, and I think it may have to do with him being not of this time."

Nicely put by the son of reporters, son of a nineteenth-century man.

Somewhere out in the Texas night, a train whistle is blowing and an old-school printer is lining up type on his composing stick. And somewhere out there, Ben Sargent is dipping his quill in a fresh well of ink.

Shermakaye Bass is an Austin-based journalist who's been reading Sargent for years and believes that whether you're "Carlson on the right" or "Begala on the left," you're a nincompoop if you can't find humor in Sargent's cartoons. You may e-mail Shermakaye at sbass@goodlifemag.com.