Cartoonist Tim Eagan – 1944-2025

The cartoonist Tim Eagan has died.

I first encountered his work when I moved to Santa Cruz in the 80s. His strip Subconscious Comics ran in the Santa Cruz Comic News. Every month we’d encounter the characters inside a single person’s head, controlled by a monkey-headed, over-confident boss. The strip was weird and funny. The various creatures that appeared were creative and sometimes disturbing. I remember grabbing the new issue of Comic News when it came out, skipping the political cartoons, and going straight to Tim’s comic.

When I was in high school, I ended up at a Halloween party filled with people from the high school my mother worked at (not a cool thing for a teenager to do, but I was never cool). And at that party was a man in a monkey mask with a large ginger beard. As it turned out, one of the people that my mother worked with was Tim Eagan’s wife and the man in the mask was, of course, Tim.

Tim was easy to talk to and was always willing to get into it about politics. But he was also funny and self-effacing. When he learned that I was interested in drawing comics, he was encouraging, but also subdued and realistic.

Around this time, Tim decided to teach a class on political cartooning and I, a budding cartoonist, decided to sign up. The class was at the local community college, Cabrillo, and I turned out to be by far the youngest person in the class. But Tim, as always, was open and welcoming. He also brought in fascinating examples of political cartooning for us to discuss at the beginning of every class. This made the class feel like an open conversation. And he met us at whatever level we were at and encouraged us to progress. The work I created was crude and blunt, but I began to develop an understanding of visual metaphor and creating a larger narrative through posture and gesture.

I went off to college and my run ins with Tim over the years happened very occasionally at gatherings at my parents’ house. But I would hear about his life tangentially from my mother and from these stories it began to dawn on me how hard the life of a cartoonist was, how difficult it was to make a living at it. But I also learned what a dedicated father Tim was, routinely volunteering in his daughter’s classes throughout her years of school.

Eventually, Tim started a new strip, a political one, Deep Cover. He was often critical of the Bush II era policies, but also regularly skewered liberal pieties and inconsistencies.

Much later, he created a full graphic novel, Head First, returning to the characters from Subconscious Comics. The story was based on a near-death experience and the book concerns itself with the self doubts and worries that one has when faced with death’s door.

This is a quick and rambling remembrance of Tim, but I wanted to get something down. Tim was the first cartoonist that I ever met and I am forever thankful for the kindness and honesty he showed me.

Here is a nice obit in the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
And a remembrance at The Daily Cartoonist.
And Tim Eagan’s Lambiek entry.