George Fisher was born in Searcy, AR and died in Little Rock, AR in 2003. Fisher is the popular editorial cartoonist who worked for many years at the Arkansas Gazette. In a typical year, he draws about 200 of these satiric commentaries on contemporary life and politics. Since 1971 The Arkansas Arts Center has been the repository for Fisher's original renderings, and now holds approximately 3000.

Fisher, who acquired an interest in politics from his father, drew his first editorial cartoon when he was fourteen. After World War II he became an editorial cartoonist for the West Memphis News. Later he operated a commercial art studio in Little Rock, while continuing to express his views as a syndicated cartoonist. He joined the Gazette staff, full-time, in 1976. He has since published numerous books of his work and appeared as a regular feature on television news programs.


(Arkansas Business, 12-16-2003)
George Fisher, legendary political cartoonist for the Arkansas Gazette, died Monday evening at his home in Little Rock. He was 80.

Fisher died at his desk, where he had just completed two new cartoons for the Arkansas Times, the weekly paper for which he had drawn cartoons since the Gazette closed in 1991, according to Times Editor Max Brantley.

“He was an institution in Arkansas political coverage,” Gov. Mike Huckabee said through a spokesman.

A widower, Fisher had no children. He is survived by two brothers, Arlie Fisher of El Paso, Texas, and Jim Fisher of Searcy.

Visitation will begin at 10 a.m. Thursday at Westbrook Funeral Home at Beebe, and the family will receive visitors from 6 to 7 p.m. that evening. A funeral will be held at 2 p.m. Friday at First United Methodist Church in Beebe, with burial in Beebe Cemetery.

The family has asked that memorials be made to Heifer International, 1600 Louisiana Street, Little Rock 72201.

Fisher was born near Searcy in 1923, the third of four children born to Charles W. and Gladys Fisher, and grew up at Beebe. His mother died when he was 5, and George and his brothers and sister were raised by their father.

In an interview he gave as part of the University of Arkansas Libraries’ Gazette Project, Fisher said he showed an aptitude for drawing from an early age and was encouraged by his college-educated father.

An Army reservist in college, Fisher was called up in 1943 and attended Infantry Training School at Camp Roberts in California, where one of his fellow trainees was comedian Red Skelton. After stints at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin and Camp Miles Standish in Massachusetts, he shipped for Plymouth, England, on Thanksgiving Day, 1944.

It was in England, at the Bournemouth Municipal Art College where the Army sent him to draw pictures for a regiment newspaper, that he met his future wife, Rosemary Snook. Fisher routinely hid her nickname, “Snooky,” in the artwork of his cartoons, and “looking for Snooky” became a popular activity among readers of the Gazette — “more so than the cartoon itself, I sometimes thought,” Fisher said. “I’m convinced of that. Because so many young people saw the cartoon who wouldn’t ordinarily read the cartoon if it didn’t have Snooky in it.”

Shortly after World War II, the Gazette chose Bill Graham over Fisher as its first full-time cartoonist.

Fisher spent three years as a reporter and cartoonist for the weekly West Memphis News. Then he and Rosemary moved to Little Rock, where he opened Fisher Art Services. His best customer was Southwestern Bell Telephone Co., which hired him to draw illustrations for advertisements in the Yellow Pages.

By the late 1950s, he was selling political cartoons to the North Little Rock Times and the Pine Bluff Commercial, and the Gazette hired him in 1964 to draw one cartoon a week for the Sunday op-ed page. In 1972, the Gazette increased its Fisher content to two cartoons a week. In 1976, he was hired full time when Graham became ill.

Fisher’s cartoons for the Gazette tended toward commentary on local rather than national or international issues, and he incorporated recurring themes — young Gov. Bill Clinton on a tricycle; Pulaski County Sheriff Tommy Robinson and his Keyhole Cops; Frank White and his half-eaten banana, a constant reminder of the ill-fated “Creation Science Act” White signed during his single term as governor. Well-known political characters often appeared together in Fisher’s “Old Guard Rest Home.”

“We were talking about his classic cartoons at a panel discussion yesterday on the [Gov. Sid] McMath years. There'll never be anyone quite like him,” said Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Brantley, the Times editor, credited Fisher with the ability to subtly influence public opinion.

“He branded Frank White in a way that made it far easier for Bill Clinton to come back,” Brantley said.

And even the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, on its Mississippi Valley Division Web site notes “eco-cartoonist” Fisher’s success in casting the Corps as “a symbol of arrogance and corruption.”

Fisher criticized the Corps “primarily because they wanted to dam every free-flowing stream in Arkansas, or that’s how he depicted it,” Brantley said.

It was typical of Fisher to depict his political targets as buffoons rather than as devils, Brantley said: “He could skewer something without really being mean. Would that the rest of us had that skill.”