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From Jack Betts' blog, This Old State:
Political junkies in North Carolina's eastern Piedmont woke up Thursday morning to a new reality: Dwane Powell, the News & Observer cartoonist who has interpreted state and national politics for more than three decades, caricatured blow-hards and the beloved alike and left no political balloon unpunctured, has taken a voluntary buyout and retired from the newspaper. He has been cartooning so long that few can remember a time when he wasn't drawing an exaggerated pompadour atop Jim Hunt's skull or those widespread beady eyes at the far corners of Jesse Helms' eyeglass frames. He skewered them equally -- and apparently they loved it. They'd call Powell to chat and ask for the original to hang at the office or at home.
Powell's last day was Thursday, and columnist Jim Jenkins let Hunt know that Powell was packing up. Hunt came by to bid Powell farewell, and under his arm he had one of Powell's cartoons from 1978.
The framed cartoon Hunt brought showed Hunt with wild, unruly hair and his wife Carolyn sitting at the breakfast table in bathrobe and curlers as Hunt asked something like, "Have you seen my curling iron?" Hunt said that was the one cartoon over a long career that got him in serious trouble - not in politics, but at home.
Powell's cartoon reference to Hunt's hair became a signature for his lampooning of the carefully groomed Hunt. Powell often portrayed him with a comb in the Hunt mane - a jibe that led to one of the funniest public performances ever given by a North Carolina governor. It was at the annual Capital Press Corps skits nearly a decade ago. Hunt showed up to perform a solo sendup of himself. At one point Hunt pulled out an oversized comb, ran it through his locks and the crowd roared in extended laughter.
It's not often you can get a governor to lampoon himself, in public. Dwane Powell did, and those of us who looked forward every morning for more than 30 years to his latest will miss his pen and his sharply defined point.
