The everyman cartoonist

Ten years ago, Rick Friday was getting calls from all over the country. He’d just been fired after 21 years as an editorial cartoonist for Farm News because of a certain cartoon, one that he later said was “the worst-drawn cartoon I’ve ever drawn.”

Suddenly, an Iowa farmer’s cartoons meant to make readers chuckle were now getting attention on a nationwide scale. A procrastinated cartoon meant to poke fun at big agriculture had now become a matter of free speech.

The cartoon in question depicted two farmers talking about profits. One of the farmer’s laments, “I wish there was more profit in farming.”

The other farmer replies, “There is. In year 2015 the CEOs of Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer and John Deere combined made more money than 2,129 Iowa farmers.”

No lies were said in the cartoon. Friday researched the salaries of those CEOs and did the math. Yet, after Farm News received word advertisers would pull out because of the cartoon, Friday got the tough end of the deal.

His story became a nationwide spotlight on his work. Friday began receiving offers from multiple newspapers across the country. Farm News would later rehire Friday, but something big was happening. Friday’s “It’s Friday!” cartoons was an inch away from syndication.

But, Friday didn’t choose that direction.

“My work’s not intended to offend people,” Friday said. “Political cartooning is kind of a dying art. To explain who I am, I have to create a balance between my creativity and my sense of humor, and try to get it all on one single frame. I could probably be more than what I am, but I’m happy where I’m at.”

Instead of exhausting himself with making cartoons his whole world, Friday instead settled for a small group of publications and a smaller output, retiring in Lorimor with his wife, Juanita. To this day, Friday refers to her as The Great Juan, one of several nicknames for his wife.

“I don’t know where he comes up with these,” Juanita said. “He has all the abilities that I don’t. He’s funny, he writes, he’s creative.”

A decade later and with a responsible role as a Union County supervisor, Rick Friday still draws cartoons. Now retired from farming and only a cartoonist through freelancing, he spends the weekend coming up with ideas for various magazines and specialized publications who have stuck with him in the time since.

Finding the right fit

Friday always had a love for art. As a tyke, he doodled on his homework and sold his sketches on the bus ride to school. Still, he worked on his family farm from the time he graduated in 1978 and into the ‘90s, until he picked up the pen again.

He submitted his first cartoon to the Creston News Advertiser. Seeing his work in print for the first time, Friday said it was an emotional moment.

“It doesn’t matter what we do, we always want to do better,” Friday said. “I can honestly say that. And it’s not that I gave up; I just didn’t think I was good enough. And I think that’s a problem with a lot of people, that they just let success blow right by them because they don’t think they’re good enough, and they let people tell them that they’re not good.”

In exchange for a newspaper subscription, Friday drew a cartoon once a week. From there, he got the attention of the weekly publication of Farm News, where he was officially hired. Farm News stayed with him even through the kerfuffle in 2016.

Now a freelancer, a variety of publications house Friday’s work. From the Missouri Beef Cattleman magazine to Mother Earth News, to Countryside & Small Stock Journal and the occasional return to Farm News, Friday is satisfied with where his comics go and the people they reach.

“I’ve had to turn other publishers down, other papers down, just because I’m happy where I’m at,” Friday said.

Today, with Friday retired as a farmer and entirely focused on his work with Union County, comics don’t come as easily.

“When I was farming and I was in the tractor eight hours a day, I had a little notebook,” Friday said. “The stuff was coming in so fast. Sometimes I’d quit, run and jot it down so I wouldn’t lose it.”

Juanita still hears cartoon ideas all the time. Friday sometimes asks his wife to text him his own ideas to make sure he won’t forget them. Sometimes, conversations with his wife make it to the paper, much to the chagrin of Juanita.

“He’s always got things running through his mind all the time,” Juanita said. “I have to tell him, ‘don’t write about that!’”

When coming up with ideas for cartoons, Friday said he rolls around puns and other ideas to try to scrunch a funny idea into a single frame. To Friday, that’s where the real difficulty of being a cartoonist comes from.

“Sometimes I come up with something, but I can’t put it in,” Friday said. “I’d love to draw this, but I can’t put it in one frame. So I have to keep working around. Very seldom do I get to the point where I scratch the whole deal, but every once in a while I just have to force myself to start over again.”

On a deadline, this could be incredibly stressful. That’s why Friday says he enjoys his current deal, working on cartoons with months in advance and mostly on the weekends. He still draws the old-fashioned way: on the kitchen table and colored with crayon pencils.

“I color everything like my grandma taught me,” Friday joked.

Friday said his favorite thing to draw for his cartoons are animals. After spending so much of his life rearing and raising animals, it’s easy to tell why.

Friday also writes regularly for the Afton Star Enterprise and Mount Ayr Record News. For those who know the phrase “It’s Friday!”, his writing is comforting and humorous.

With a penchant for representing and depicting the average farmer, it’s easy to see Rick Friday as an eccentric “everyman” through relatable humor. Whether it’s imagining what animals talk about or a silly conversation with his wife, decades of those ideas have been preserved in his comics.

A collection of arrowheads

Something Friday has picked up over the years is a love of American Indian culture, collecting arrowheads and other artifacts over the years. He’s used this personal collection as a way to teach others, appearing in local schools to give physical evidence of how cultures and tools evolve across the ages.

“I go to schools and teach the culture and stone tool technology,” Friday said. “I start with the paleo course and work my way up and I show the kids 10,000 years of stone tool technology.”

Although cartooning has given Friday a purpose, with Friday calling it a creative gift, archeology would have been his passion if he could live his life again. The impression he’s made on students hasn’t left them.

“I’ve been doing this for 20-some years, and I’d be at Fareway and they’d look up and go, ‘Hi, Mr. Friday,’” Friday said. “I don’t know who she is, but she said, ‘I still look for arrowheads,’ and I’d remember how she must have met me.”

Nowadays, Rick Friday works for the county, currently serving as the chairman for the Union County Board of Supervisors. One of only three, Friday never thought he’d become a politician in this way. But, as a way to help local neighbors, he said this was the best way.

“County government’s not anything like I thought it was,” Friday said. “But, every day I do it for the people I work for and that’s the way I was raised. That’s the way.”

Part of accepting the role of supervisor in 2018 was accepting his retirement as a farmer. As a long-time cattle farmer, it was a tough choice. After all, this was a man who used to talk to the cattle like friends, according to his wife.

“I couldn’t raise cattle and do the county job,” Friday said. “I had to give something up because I couldn’t sit in that county room for four to six hours knowing that I had a cow or a mother cow that was giving birth and I wasn’t there to save her or that calf. So I had to make that decision and it wasn’t an easy decision to make.”

To aspiring artists, whether looking to fulfill themselves creatively professionally or in their downtime, he has some advice. First, make sure to save your work.

“What you see right now, what you do right now, you might not think it’s good enough or a publisher might reject it, but I learned my lessons,” Friday said. “Don’t let anybody sell you short. Opportunities are lost when you don’t think you’re good enough.”