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Meet Jim Borgman

Since 1976, Jim Borgman has satirized politicians and newsmakers as the editorial cartoonist for The Cincinnati Enquirer, to the delight of newspaper readers all across America. He won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1991 and the coveted Reuben Award in 1993, which is given to the most outstanding cartoonist of the year by the National Cartoonists Society. As co-creator (with Jerry Scott) of the comic strip Zits, Borgman's work now reaches every corner of the globe.

Jim Borgman was born Feb. 24, 1954 in Cincinnati and is a product of its blue-collar schools and neighborhoods. A 1976 graduate of Kenyon College, he graduated summa cum laude with Phi Beta Kappa honors. Borgman was hired to begin as the Enquirer's daily cartoonist one week after graduation, on the strength of the weekly cartoon he had drawn for the Kenyon Collegian. As a result he became, he says, "the first Kenyon art major ever to repay his student loan."

Jim Borgman's work is notable for its warmth, compassion and, paradoxically, for its biting edge. Borgman squirms at any attempt to label him politically, calling himself a "progressive iconoclast with a dirt-under-my-fingernails conservative streak." He attributes his cartoons less to ideology than to a contrary nature. "If the crowd starts leaning one way, I instinctively lean the other way. These cartoons are not final pronouncements. They are works in progress, all of them, done in the spirit of firing up the American debate."

In the summer of 1996 Jim Borgman teamed up with Jerry Scott (co-creator of Baby Blues) to create the wildly popular comic strip that chronicles the life and times of 15-year-old Jeremy Duncan. The strip launched in July 1997. Within one year, Zits was syndicated to over 500 newspapers, making it one of the fastest growing comic strips in history. Now Zits appears in more than 1,500 newspapers worldwide and has been voted Best Comic Strip for two consecutive years by the National Cartoonists Society (NCS). Borgman is the only person to be given the Best Editorial Cartoonist of the Year award by the NCS five times.

Borgman is married to Suzanne Soled, a professor at Northern Kentucky University, and they have five children, four of them teenagers. His personal blog can be found at http://frontier.cincinnati.com/blogs/borgman/