A Perfect Fit   

The Washington Post hires Pulitzer Prize-winning Buffalo News cartoonist Tom Toles to succeed the late, legendary Herblock.

The Washington Post's new cartoonist, Tom Toles, thinks he and the paper are "a perfect match." When he got the offer to succeed the legendary Herblock, who died last year after 55 years at the Post, Toles thought "they had made the right decision."

"Ideologically, I can't say issue by issue, when I read their editorials, they think about things the same way I do," says Toles, 50, who won a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons in the Buffalo News. "People I know at the Post seem to have the same energy and tone that I do.... It just feels so right."

Syndicated in 200 newspapers, Toles' cartoons feature bloated-looking characters whose heads and faces are drawn with few--but dead-on--distinguishing features, like cat ears on President George W. Bush. In the lower right corner there's always a tiny depiction of the artist at his worktable offering a side commentary.

"You don't think of him as a caricaturist in terms of a lot of elaborate lines," says Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt. "When he does a little Bill Gates, you know it's Bill Gates in a very funny way."

His debut as a political cartoonist in 1980, at the now-defunct Buffalo Courier-Express, provoked a barrage of hate mail, says Toles, who joined the Buffalo News the following year. "I had the good fortune [to have] a publisher who said, 'Just keep doing what you're doing.' "

He regularly reads the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Republic (for which he draws cartoons) and The New York Review of Books, plus a variety of online and other printed publications. "I try to find subjects that I not only have an opinion about and not just a passing interest, but issues that I look at and I feel that something is definitely out of kilter and it bugs me," he says. Sometimes he'll take on a topic that's ongoing but in the background, such as an environmental issue.

"Tom almost never is doing something that a large group of people is doing," Hiatt says. "He's doing it in his own way, and that was really appealing."

How does he make the creative leap from subject to cartoon?

"When the crunch comes, when the paper is there in front of you, I just feel a high level of stress and borderline panic is required to make the whole thing come together," Toles says. "That's why I'm probably not going to live to 91 like Herblock did."