Nearly every day for the past 16 years, Sean Delonas has drawn a figurative target in the middle of “Page Six” and fired away.
He does not aim to please. Delonas’ cartoons – incisive, perverse, gleefully vicious – are never boring. And no one is safe from his arrows. Repeat offenders he has skewered include Michael Jackson, the Clintons, Al Sharpton, the French, Donald Trump and Ted Kennedy.
But ultimately it’s anyone in politics, in Hollywood, in sports, and in the tabloids who has just made the news for all the wrong reasons – and begs to be bled.
In person, though, the anti-“Doonesbury” of political cartoonists makes for an unlikely executioner.
“I think what I draw is all in good fun,” shrugs the beefy, soft-spoken Buffalo native and New York Academy of Art graduate, who would rather talk about his 9-year-old son, Ryan, or his boxer dog, Mugsy, than, say, Winona Ryder’s kleptomania or Peter Braunstein’s foot fetish.
Delonas, 44, does have skeletons in his closet, however – including one of an infant Siamese twin.
“I keep them locked away,” says the collector of human “oddities.” “They’re just too scary to look at.”
Which is how some would describe his cartoons.
Recalls Delonas: “This enraged woman once said to me, ‘You are the biggest sleazebag,’ and I just started laughing, and the more I laughed, the madder she got. I can’t believe anybody gets upset at what I do.”
It’s doubtful, though, that anyone would find his Italian-Renaissance-style mural – which encompasses a wall of Midtown’s St. Agnes Church – sleazy.
And Delonas shows his softer side in his upcoming children’s book, “Scuttle’s Big Wish.”
“It’s about a mouse and how the only thing it likes in life is cheese,” he says.
Okay, enough with words. Submitted for your disapproval, our resident toonsmith’s pick of his litter. (It’s OK to laugh).
Chicken Factor
When Bill Clinton is the subject of a Delonas panel, invariably a chicken will be placed in the comic, acting as a kind of “Where’s Waldo?” What is the significance of the chicken? “One day, I was drawing Bill Clinton and chickens
just popped into my head,” says Delonas. “I thought it would be funny if they were there with him all the time. They just sort of go with him! Since Bill was able to dodge the Vietnam War, and Hillary seems to rule the roost in their hen-pecked relationship, chickens just seemed like a natural to be following him around.” And readers enjoy the ubiquitous chickens. “When I started adding them, everybody got a kick out of it.”