Scott Stantis

A conservative with a sense of humor? It's not an oxymoron, it's Scott Stantis and his comic strip, "Prickly City."

Think of it like this: if P.J. O’Rourke did a comic strip, it would be a lot like "Prickly City." As Stantis puts it, "As a conservative it always seemed a bit unfair that there was no comic strip rebuttal to the likes of 'Doonesbury' and 'The Boondocks.' Plus, I can expand on an idea and I get to do it with great characters. Comic strips, with their multiple panels, are fantastic vehicles for driving home a point that you just can’t do in the daily editorial cartoon format."

Since 1996, Stantis has been the editorial cartoonist for The Birmingham News; he also produces a weekly editorial cartoon for USA Today, and writes guest columns for both these newspapers. His work is syndicated to over 400 newspapers and has been featured in several prominent national publications and on television news programs. Stantis also created "The Buckets," a family comic strip which he turned over to an assistant in 2004 in order to concentrate solely on his editorial cartooning and "Prickly City."

Stantis received his art training under the guidance of great cartoonists like Paul Conrad of The Los Angeles Times and Bill Schorr of the now defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He is a past president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and current chairman of Industry Outreach for the Herblock Fund Development of the AAEC. He has a seat on the board of directors of the Epilepsy Foundation of Central and Northern Alabama. Stantis is enrolled in 2004s Class of Leadership Birmingham.

A California native, Stantis has been married for over two decades to his college sweetheart, Janien Fadich-Stantis. They have two high school aged sons, a dog named Dogzilla and live in a suburb of Birmingham.