(C) Arizona Mirror
This story was originally published by Arizona Mirror and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Steve Benson’s greatest gift wasn’t his art — it was his heart [1]

['Jim Small', 'Emily Holshouser', 'Joe Watson', 'Blake Morlock Tucson Sentinel', 'More From Author', 'July', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline']

Date: 2025-07-10

For nearly five years, my job came with a perk that sometimes left me feeling like I needed to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming: I was the first person to see every new Steve Benson cartoon.

Growing up in Phoenix in the 1980s and 1990s, it’s no exaggeration to say that Steve Benson was a household name. His was the one name that most people would give if you asked them to name someone who worked at the Arizona Republic.

His work was as ubiquitous as it was powerful, and it not only sparked watercooler conversations in workplaces across the state, but it sometimes actually drove news cycles.

I still am in awe of the fact that I got to call Steve a colleague and a friend, and that he so eagerly let me not only peek under the hood of his creative process, but become a part of it.

We would talk multiple times a day as he refined his ideas and drafted his twice-weekly cartoons for the Arizona Mirror. It took me a couple of months to work up the courage to make a suggestion during one of those calls, and almost as soon as the words slipped past my lips, I wanted to stuff them back in. After all, I would rank myself as one of the least artistic people among the billions who walk this planet — who was I to be making any kind of suggestion to a legend? And what must he think of this keyboard jockey, this ink-stained wretch who can’t even draw a neat circle, having the temerity to question his idea?

Steve’s response floored me: He not only engaged with my idea, but he used it as the inspiration to add new elements to the piece. He gushed about how he missed bouncing his ideas off of people in the newsroom and getting instant feedback as he walked around and showed drafts to his peers. He told me the suggestion I gave him made his work better.

It’s that compassion, that openness, that gentle manner that I remember most about working with Steve. If you ask anyone who knew him, they’ll all circle back to how genuinely kind and welcoming he was, how every interaction with him involved smiles and jokes and laughter, how deep he believed in the power of connecting with people.

Like how he befriended an intern at the Republic who he saw grabbing some of his discarded drafts, then started going out of his way to make sure that intern — who had since been hired as a reporter — had fresh drafts of his own and wasn’t left to scrounge around the office copier to find strays.

“I started decorating my cubicle with the Benson drawings I found around the office and the ones he handed me,” Mirror reporter Jerod MacDonald-Evoy recounted on Wednesday. “He started bringing them directly to my cubicle as well. It was something I always looked forward to, my little interactions with the great Benson.”

Likewise, editorial cartoonist and Phoenix native Chris Britt recalls how Steve’s giant heart led to a decades-long friendship. A recent college graduate and struggling cartoonist, Britt said he repeatedly contacted Steve at the Republic in the hopes that he could get some advice.

“I kept pestering him and he finally brought me down. We went through like 12 of my cartoons and he gave me advice about what to do to make them better,” Britt told me. “We struck up this wonderful friendship.”

And while the man who he said was undoubtedly his mentor was “one of the most important cartoonists who ever put ink to paper,” what Britt will miss most about Steve is his humor and his friendship.

“He was just a really giving, loving guy. That was his gift,” Britt said. “Whenever he would call, I just couldn’t wait to answer it.”

What I wouldn’t give for just one more of those phone calls myself.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://azmirror.com/2025/07/10/steve-bensons-greatest-gift-wasnt-his-art-it-was-his-heart/

Published and (C) by Arizona Mirror
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/azmirror/