Dr. Martin Luther King dedicated his life to inspiring people to be the best they can be, and to love everyone, regardless of race or gender.  I grew up in Washington, DC  during the Civil Rights Movement, and Dr. King made a huge impression on me. As a child I could easily understand his message and did not complicate his message in my mind with adult worries.  I felt so blessed that Dr. King loved me, even though I am white, and I vowed at a young age to return the love any way I could as I headed into adulthood.  Then he was shot and killed. It was a huge shock to my young mind that there were people out there that wanted to kill him. I was thirteen.

There are a lot of reasons why I became a cartoonist.  I loved making people smile, and still do. So if I can do that and help make the world a better place, I feel extremely fortunate. Recently, my work with Cartooning for Peace, World Ink and  TEDWomen, has shown me that connecting around the world as people, through the (often wordless) medium of cartoons, can be very powerful. Laughter is universal and peace can be too. It goes without saying that love, as Dr. King so desperately wanted us to understand, has to be.