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What Stantis didn’t draw on was any particular sense of Drury himself. Stantis didn’t grow up here, and for the past 11 years he’s been the cartoonist for the News in Birmingham, Alabama. (He also draws one cartoon a week for USA Today, and a daily comic strip, Prickly City, that the Tribune used to carry.) Stantis keeps tabs with Chicago because the city fascinates him and also because he sends the Tribune the occasional Chicago-based cartoon. He’s been doing that for years and more frequently in the past couple of months, since Bruce Dold, editor of the editorial page, called and encouraged him to.
Ideally, he said, when something big happens in Chicago the story won’t be complete until the city finds out in the morning what Stantis had to say about it. MacNelly didn’t play that role — he lived in Virginia and stuck to national issues. And in fact nobody’s played that role in Chicago media since Mike Royko, and it could be that nobody will ever play it again. That show might be over.
