She Has Drawn for The New Yorker for 40 Years. Why Did Her Line Turn From Gentle to Blunt and Fierce?

The politics she wants to get at, she says, is the kind that runs through culture — because "the anger is there, it's just below the surface."

Liza Donnelly is bent over her drawing. Tourists file past her, stopping now and then to look at what she is making; people talk around her, but she never looks up, as if she has fused with the brickwork under her feet.

"It feels a bit like meditation."

She takes her iPad everywhere. About two years ago this light little device replaced her paper, pens and paints, but the work it does is the same: watching, blending in, catching things.

In the few minutes she paused on the Great Wall, she drew an old man in a skullcap bent over a broom. Outside a subway station she watched a vendor with a bag over her shoulder hawking small national flags. "The interesting thing was that she — the vendor — would put the flag straight into the child's hand, then try to get the parents to pay for it. I drew that too."

Donnelly lives in New York. In 1979 she sold a drawing to The New Yorker for the first time, and has been a full-time cartoonist ever since.

Today she is one of the best-known political cartoonists in the world, and her work with The New Yorker has won her more awards than she can count. Her cartoons have also run in The New York Times, on CBS and Fox News, and in Politico. In recent years she has become known for drawing live, on the spot — a new form of visual reporting that made her the first cartoonist admitted to the Oscars ceremony itself.

"I try to catch the small things other people don't see." She draws the hosts in their glittering clothes and the stars on the red carpet; she also slips behind a curtain to sketch the worker giving an Oscar statuette its last polish.

She has been invited to the Grammys, the 2016 Democratic National Convention and White House press briefings, and she covered the 2017 U.S. presidential election live.

Even now, women's voices are missing, out of all proportion, from the stages where laughter is made: stand-up, satirical cartoons, comedies. One stubborn assumption holds that women simply aren't as funny, that being funny is a man's job.

When Donnelly joined The New Yorker's stable of cartoonists, only three other women were working there, but she "never thought of myself as a woman cartoonist; I was just a cartoonist who happened to be a woman." Ten years ago that experience led her to write a book, Funny Ladies, celebrating the women who work in a profession dominated by men. She has written several more books since.

Through all of it, sending cartoons to The New Yorker has stayed her routine. Read the papers, watch the news, pick out the phrases and trends of the moment, daydream a little, doodle a little, stitch different characters and settings together, then send six or seven drawings to the cartoon editor and wait for the verdict on submission day — a routine that every cartoonist there treats as something close to sacred.

Her work is usually one small drawing, the image and the lines plain, with a line or two of caption or dialogue under it, so that it all looks effortless. That is the classic style of a New Yorker editorial cartoon.

Sitting across from Donnelly, it is hard to match her at once with the title "political cartoonist." From how fast she talks to how she carries herself, she gives off calm. Asked to size up her colleagues, she says over and over that she "would rather not judge other people," that "different approaches and styles should be allowed to exist."

But as Bob Mankoff, The New Yorker's former cartoon editor, put it, "being funny is being awake." For Donnelly, cartoons are how she resists many of the world's rules, in her own way.

Donnelly spent her childhood in Washington. America in the late 1960s was tense and restless: the shock of the Kennedy assassination had not settled, and as the country sank deeper into Vietnam, the hippie counterculture rose to its peak and Woodstock's love and peace twisted quickly into a militant antiwar force.

The civil rights movement and the women's movement were both growing fast, and as one old order after another broke, the young were forced to think about where they stood in their own time.

"I think I was a little scared, because the whole world was full of uncertainty … like every other young person, I felt an extreme distrust of government."

She knew from the start that she was not the type to step forward and shout slogans. Cartoons became the outlet for what the times and politics stirred up in her. "It didn't turn me into an activist in the end, but underneath, those experiences left me questioning a lot of things."

Not much of that showed in her early work for The New Yorker. She drew mild, everyday little cartoons, with only the occasional remark about an election or gun rights. Back then Donnelly felt she did not know enough about politics to pass judgment on it.

Then came September 11.

"I was truly shaken … I felt I couldn't go on drawing cartoons at all, that nothing looked funny anymore."

A few months later The New Yorker bought a cartoon of hers and ran it. The scene is a living room: a news anchor on television, mouth open mid-sentence, and a little girl looking up at her father on the couch with his newspaper, asking, "Daddy, can I stop worrying now?"

That drawing mattered a great deal to her. It meant she had come out of a block that had left her feeling powerless, and it showed her another way political cartoons could work.

Another cartoonist's drawing from the same period stayed with her: a man and a woman standing at a bar, the man in a preposterous jacket, the woman saying, "I thought I'd never laugh again."

"I felt that described the moment perfectly," Donnelly said. In the face of huge trauma or a major political question, humor has a place alongside collective grief and anger. "Not just making light of the situation, but really trying to say something."

From then on she moved further into political cartoons, and paid particular attention to women's rights.

"I realized you can draw about culture and politics without always being angry." Political cartooning has a long history in the United States. But in its early years, and right through the years Liza grew up in, the form leaned toward the blunt, the "loud," the emotionally heated.

Those drawings are crowded with red-faced people, politicians drawn ugly and exaggerated, and piles of symbols — and that style is still everywhere today. Against it stands Donnelly's "quiet cartoon."

"The anger is there, it's just below the surface. I want to use cartoons to talk about certain problems, but I don't want to push people away. A cartoon should start a conversation, and anger sometimes pushes readers away instead of pulling them into one."

Some cartoonists can carry a reader across time and space, from a medieval battlefield in full armor to weightless outer space. In the stories told by Liza's husband, Michael Maslin, also a New Yorker cartoonist, the main character might be a member of some ancient cave-dwelling tribe.

Donnelly's stories are more ordinary. Her scenes move between the living room, the office and the sidewalk, and the dentist's office turns up especially often.

Even her earliest work shows that she never set out to build a fantastical world. These everyday settings are tools she can reach for without thinking, and they serve each new conversation or idea.

The advantage of the style is that readers step into it quickly and feel with the people on the page. Over time it leaves a certain impression: that the character of a city soaks into the most ordinary daily life, and that politics does not happen only in the halls of Congress or on the political talk shows.

"The politics I want to express and explore is the kind that runs more through culture," Donnelly said.

"I have a lot of cartoons about women's rights, for example, but what they usually look at is how people talk to each other, how they treat each other. It can be very quiet and still expose an underlying problem. That's the way I lean — commenting on shifting trends, on changes in relations between the sexes, changes in family relations and so on. Those things, like everything else, are also a political discussion."

Next to a novel or a film, a cartoon has something all its own: it is always a comment, always carrying an attitude. And next to an opinion column, a cartoon is far easier to approach.

"If you can make someone laugh," Donnelly said, "there's a chance they'll see a different point of view … and besides, who doesn't like looking at a cartoon?"

That is not the whole story. A cartoon can just as easily drive people apart and become a destructive force.

Starting in September 2005, 12 cartoons mocking the Islamic prophet Muhammad ran, one after another, in Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's best-selling daily. They caused enormous anger across the Islamic world, brought terrorist threats from some extremists, and set off a long chain of news and political events.

Ten years later, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was attacked by terrorists and 12 people were killed, among them several senior editors and cartoonists.

Both events shook political cartoonists everywhere. Many believe the cartoons themselves were not the problem; they only sharpened tensions and forces the era had already produced. In a global crisis, the cartoon seemed to act as a mirror, enlarging one editor's small decision at one publication into a layered political and diplomatic conflict with international reach.

Either way, these events forced cartoonists to think again about their profession and their place in society.

While the Danish cartoon affair was still spreading, Donnelly spoke at the United Nations as the representative of a cartoonists' peace organization. After the Charlie Hebdo attack she was invited to the fifth international conference of editorial cartoonists, held that year in Caen, France, on the subject of Charlie Hebdo and free speech. She also wrote about it for The New York Times: "While we must be forceful, inflammatory images or words are not always the answer … these are deeply personal decisions, and I wholeheartedly defend my colleagues' right to make them."

"In many of the cartoons that appeared right after the Paris attack, the pen was drawn as a sword or a gun. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see my pen as a gun. I see it as an olive branch."

Humor can create empathy and bring people together, and it can also be used as a weapon that hardens prejudice and stereotype, that attacks and shuts out people who are different. Donnelly believes firmly in freedom of the press, and she also believes that when she sits down to make an editorial cartoon she has to draw a personal line.

The 2016 U.S. election was an important moment for many cartoonists. Even artists who had rarely touched politics felt they had to speak. All at once social media filled with every kind of voice, and Donnelly's was one of them.

The New Yorker is not her only platform. A few years ago she began posting her own work on social media — some of it closer to an essay, some of it work The New Yorker probably would not choose to publish. It quickly made her a commentator with a following of her own.

During the campaign she published all kinds of cartoons. In her drawings Trump was a short man in oversized shorts with an exaggerated pompadour, aiming a slingshot at his rivals, "because to the other candidates he was like a schoolyard bully."

That series is among the fiercest and bluntest work she has ever made.

After Trump won, Donnelly did not know for a while how to respond. When she picked up her pen again she had made a decision: she dropped the oversized shorts, a detail most people would have thought harmless. "This country is already full of division, so to go on mocking him … of course, I'm not criticizing my colleagues, it's just that I really am a different kind of cartoonist than they are."

"I don't want my cartoons to make that crack any wider."

That is also why, for a long time, Donnelly did not join the AAEC, the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. "I won't draw 'those' cartoons, and they didn't want me either." Then things changed: the AAEC gradually opened up to different forms. Today Liza is the association's vice president.

Forty years in, Donnelly is both a commentator and a record-keeper of her time.

She keeps drawing for different outlets and trying out different forms on her own Medium blog. She also writes illustrated pieces for The New York Times and CNN, and CBS recently asked her to make a short film about Air Force One and how Trump was remaking it.

All the while she keeps thinking about what cartoons are for and what they mean.

Even now, invited to speak and appear all over the world, she still finds it very hard to carry a message across cultures. The voice she represents, that of a white American from New York's Upper East Side, cannot speak for everyone.

In a TED talk, she said: "I live a life of American privilege, but I had a hard time figuring out who I am and why I'm here … cartooning has always been my saving grace. And I believe art has a power to open people's eyes that nothing else has — and not only the eyes of the people using it."

In her cartoons she tries to expose the foolish and absurd things Americans do, the pressure people put on themselves and each other in daily life, and to explore political questions by drawing how people react to that pressure and absorb it.

Donnelly started drawing very young, "because I realized I could make my mother laugh. That mattered." She grew up in a middle-class family, but her childhood was not the calm, warm picture some people imagine. Her parents fought constantly, and her older sister was a troubled teenager.

Cartoons became her tool for trying to heal the cracks in the family. It doesn't seem to have worked, she says of herself: her parents divorced in the end and her sister went to prison. But cartoons have stayed with her ever since, and now help her try to repair the cracks in society.

"People sometimes ask me whether I think cartoons can change the world. Realistically, it's very hard to change anyone's mind with a cartoon, though it has happened in history … but we hope to bring about change, and a lot of cartoonists are like that — optimists who are pessimistic about the world," she told QDaily.

Donnelly wrote up her trip to China on her blog, together with all the sketches she made along the way. They catch many moments that were new to her: steam rising off a jianbing stall; overloaded three-wheelers carrying recycled cardboard rolling past one after another; old men playing chess on a bench in front of a newsstand.

"At the start of my journey, as the plane was about to land in Beijing, I noticed the moon out the window," she wrote at the end. "I suddenly realized it was the same moon I see at home. We all live under the same moon."

Cover image: "You're fired." From the artist's website.