After getting his BFA at  Cooper Union in 1976 Brodner became editorial cartoonist at The Hudson Dispatch, in Union City, New Jersey. In 1977 Steven Heller, protean art director of The New York Times Book Review, began tapping him for illustration assignments. Eventually Brodner realized he could survive nicely just doing this without ever having a real job. This is called Freelance Illustration. To this day he is still confused about how this works.

In 1979-82 he published his own journal, The New York Illustrated News which was a little like this Bicycle but using a technique called printing. In 1981 he became a regular contributor to Harper’s magazine with the monthly feature, “Ars Politica”, a name thought up by Lewis Lapham, Harper’s editor. In the late 1980’s, as editors realized that Ronald Reagan was less like an Olympian God and more like a rotting puppet, more magazines asked Brodner to contribute regularly. These included the National Lampoon, Sports Illustrated, Playboy and Spy. In 1988 Esquire brought him in as an unofficial house artist. It was there that he did portrait caricature, art journalism and a back-page political cartoon, “Adversaria”. This all served to convince him that illustration was an important part of the mix of any journalistic enterprise. Well . . . isn’t it?  Since then he has worked for most major publications in the US and Canada.

Art Journalism

In visual essays Steve Brodner has covered eight national political conventions for Esquire, The Progressive, the Village Voice and others. His article, “Plowed Under”, a series of portraits and interviews with beleaguered farm families in the Midwest ran in The Progressive, which, at that time was a modern mecca for political art, thanks to Patrick jb Flynn, crusading art director. “Shot From Guns”, an art documentary about the Colt Firearms strike in Hartford, Connecticut appeared in Northeast magazine in 1989. For The New Yorker he covered Oliver North and the 1994 Virginia Senate race, the Patrick Buchanan presidential campaign, the Million Man March and an advance story on the Democratic Convention in Chicago, 1996. The Washington Post asked him to profile the Bob Dole presidential campaign in 1996. In spring 1997, he  wrote and drew an ten-page article on the South by Southwest Music Festival for Texas Monthly. That summer he climbed Mt. Fuji for Outside Magazine. That fall he did a piece on the New York City mayoral campaign for New York Magazine. His eight-page profile of George W. Bush appeared in Esquire in October, 1998, in which Bush said to him, “Maybe I’ll see you in national politics next year, maybe not. Either way, I have a cool life.” In 2000 he dealt with the difficult issue of guns in Pennsylvania for Philadelphia Magazine. Texas Monthly published his 10 page story on Colonias (Mexican Americans along the Texas border) called “In America”, May, 2005.  In 2007, he traipsed around the Texas State House at Austin in a freewheeling story for Texas Monthly.

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