To Our Readers

By Elizabeth Valk Long

% There are plenty of cartoonists satirizing the Washington political scene. But none do it with the singular blend of whimsy and insight of Mark Alan Stamaty, whose cartoon strip Washingtoon has appeared in scores of newspapers across the country for more than a decade. With this issue, Stamaty brings Washingtoon exclusively to TIME, where it will appear each week in the Chronicles section. "Mark's arrival is a natural step for us," says Chronicles editor Bruce Handy. "The section already looks at news from a 90 degrees angle. And TIME has long nurtured the individual voices of essayists and columnists."

An equal-opportunity lampoonist, Stamaty, 46, joyfully skewers both ends of the political spectrum and all points in between. His best-known character, Bob Forehead, is an earnest, airheaded Congressman who resembles John F. Kennedy, spouts conservative shibboleths and has seldom had a thought that didn't come straight from his political handlers.

Stamaty, whose mother and father were both cartoonists, grew up in Elberon, New Jersey, and "always kind of knew I would be an artist and a writer, except when I was 14 and wanted to be a baseball player." That aberration passed, and Stamaty went on to earn a fine-arts degree from Cooper Union in New York City. After illustrating several children's books in the 1970s, he produced comic strips for the Village Voice in New York. In 1981 he started Washingtoon in the Voice and the Washington Post, which eventually syndicated the strip nationally. He has since published two book-length collections of Washingtoon and has seen it become the basis for a cable-TV series in the 1980s.

Stamaty regards his job as "watching the political landscape as it goes by and trying to see it fresh each time." A veteran of the campaign trail, he also travels widely between elections, soaking up sights, sounds and information at venues as varied as health-care seminars and conventions of defense contractors.

He is particularly intrigued by what he considers to be the gulf between perception and reality in Washington. Into this maelstrom rush pompous politicians who in Stamaty's world are invariably filled with sound and fury that only add to the confusion. The business of government, Stamaty says, "is so massive and complex that our public dialogue often gets boiled down to an absurd and insufficient shorthand." That being the case, we invite you to laugh -- and to groan -- along with him.