An artist of his times

Waterloo newspaper cartoonist, comic strip illustrator Jack Bender passes away at 91

Jan 10, 2023

This Jack Bender cartoon appeared on page 1 of the Waterloo Courier Nov. 24, 1963

Newspaper cartooning is a fading if not lost art. One of the very best at it, longtime Waterloo Courier cartoonist Jack Bender, passed away Jan. 5 at age 91 after a battle with dementia.
He worked for decades at the Courier and other publications and took over the syndicated "Alley Oop" comic strip in later years, after retiring from the paper and moving to Tulsa, Okla. He was a graduate of Waterloo East High School, the University of Iowa and received a master’s degree from the University of Missouri. He received numerous professional awards and honors.

Locally, Jack’s cartoons and art were a staple of the Courier from the 1960s through the early ‘80s.
His political cartoons were a regular feature of the Courier’s editorial pages. He also did outstanding pencil sketches of everyone from prominent local and national public figures to Courier staffers for use with their regular columns.
He was, in fact, the Courier’s art department. You could see traces of his handiwork on any number of the paper’s regular standing features and “house” advertisements for the paper, decades before Shutterstock and so many of the online art services many publications now rely on.

This is the 1974 Waterloo Courier Football Tabloid, featuring an illustation by cartoonist Jack Bender of incoming University of Iowa football coach Bob Commings and mentor Forrest Evashevski.

I was able to work with Jack briefly at the Courier as a student intern in the late 1970s. Before that, he mentored me, as a recent high school graduate, in covering some of my first sporting events for the Cedar Falls Record, a sister publication of the Courier. I’d see him at games when his son Tony played baseball for Northern University High School in Cedar Falls. Jack himself was a pretty good ballplayer in high school and college.

Jack donated some of his original drawings to the Grout Museum District and they were displayed as part of the Grout’s "Pin it and Win It" political memorabilia exhibit in 2020-21.

A Jack Bender Waterloo Courier cartoon spoofing “presidential fashion setting” after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.

A Nov. 5, 1978 Waterloo Courier editorial cartoon by Jack Bender on low voter turnout for the off-year general election.

His work appeared in numerous sports magazines and books and Iowa History Journal.

To give folks who don't remember Jack some idea of his talent and the profound impact it could have, I’ve posted at the top of this column a cartoon that ran on page 1 of the Courier on Nov. 24, 1963 -- two days after President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

I first saw this cartoon as a six-year old child at the time of the assassination. I never forgot it. My folks saved the paper and I'm sure many households in Northeast Iowa did the same.

JFK was killed 60 years ago this year. In 2013, as a Courier reporter, I covered an event on the 50th anniversary of the assassination at the Waterloo Public Library, put on by Humanities Iowa, on how the event was represented in the media at the time.

When the presenter, former high school journalism teacher Bill Sherman of Humanities Iowa, showed Jack's cartoon, there was silence. And tears — a half century later. Jack Bender's work still had that impact because it had the power to evoke the emotions of that time -- perhaps more eloquently than could be put into words.

Jack Bender had a real gift. He could make people laugh, appreciate the irony of a situation, lampoon with humor a public official who deserved it occasionally, make us proud of our community --- and in this case with the JFK assassination, capture our utter grief.

I'm pretty sure Jack, an Air Force Reserve officer and Korean War era veteran, transferred the grief he was feeling himself over our fallen president into this outstanding work.

In so doing, he captured what people were feeling - because he was one of us.
And that, my friends, is a big part of what real journalism at its most basic level is all about.
At its highest form, it’s art. And Jack Bender was a journalist with an artist’s soul.

Iowa Writers’ Collaborative Columnists