Walt Kelly on political cartooning having to be weeks behind the news

KELLY:... We're in a hell of a lot of trouble now. We have a built-in comic named Agnew who is our vice president, and he has come out with a lot of things that are ripe for comment, and we're in a stupid business where you have to wait six to eight weeks before you can say anything about him. The comic strip business is very American in that it is always safe. You have to lean over backwards to get yourself in trouble, and I lean over backwards fairly well. I would love to be saying something about Agnew now, and there's no reason why I shouldn't. Hell, I've had a year to wait for him to do anything, just about, and I'm not doing it. So this is how good my work is: I'm still confined to these things, to our practice of putting our strips out six to eight weeks after the news is off the bush, and this is not good. We as cartoonists should always be commenting on what the hell's right in front of our noses all the time. That's what Rube [Goldberg] did in the old days, and I don't know, how many days did you have for your stuff, Rube, you didn't turn it out every day, did you?
RUBE GOLDBERG: [from audience] Yeah, every day, yeah.
KELLY: But was it a one day release?
GOLDBERG: Yeah.
KELLY: You see, this was great, this stuff was right on the nose in teens and early '20s. We can't do that now.

[Garry Trudeau must have heard this and taken it as a challenge]