Comic Timing: Mike Peters Delivers Wash U Address

Mike Peters, the 1981 Pulitzer Prize winner for editorial cartooning and creator of the award-winning cartoon strip Mother Goose & Grimm, gave the 2012 Commencement address at .

Peters, who earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Washington University in 1965, addressed approximately 2,800 members of the Class of 2012 and their friends and family members.

Peters told the Washington Post's Comic Riffs that despite the nerves, he knew what he needed to say. 

“This was my college, and they were giving me an honorary doctorate, and it was in front of 17,000 people,” he told Comic Riffs. “I knew if I had a message,” he says, “it should simply be that I was doing what I loved.”

His editorial cartoons appear in more than 400 newspapers and publications worldwide, including Newsweek, Time and U.S. News & World Report. 

Born in St. Louis in 1943, the graduate was interested in cartooning, and particularly political cartooning, since his childhood growing up in the Dogtown neighborhood. 

Peters was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame with a star on Delmar Boulevard in 2002.