POLITICAL CARTOONS: Mike Peters reacts to winning National Headliner Award [UPDATED]

Dayton Daily News cartoonist Mike Peters is the winner of the 2011 National Headliner Award for Editorial Cartoons, the awards group has announced.

Peters keeps his streak alive, having also won the National Headliner Award for cartooning in 2010.

“Whenever these awards happen, it’s always the same feeling,” Peters tells Comic Riffs. “You can’t believe that someone gives you an award for doing what you absolutely love to do anyway.”

Since joining the Daily News in 1969, Peters, 67 — who was mentored by the cartooning great Bill Mauldin — has won a raft of industry awards, including the 1981 Pulitzer Prize. He also draws the strip “Mother Goose & Grimm,” which is syndicated by King Features.

Stuart Carlson of the syndicate Universal Uclick was the runner-up, and Adam Zyglis of the Buffalo News took third place. Carlson was let go by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2008 in what was termed a “voluntary buyout,” after the newspaper reportedly couldn’t justify his full-time staff position.

Peters tells Comic Riffs he loves it when a fellow cartoonist who has been “laid off” wins such an award. “It shows they are still doing some of the best work in the country for the love of it,” Peters says. “I think the last 10 years have proven that when a cartoonist says, ‘I would do this job whether I get paid or not,’ we really mean it.

“God love cartoonists, I’m proud to be one.”

Carlson, for his part, says to us about the honor: “I consider being a runner-up to a terrific cartoonist like Mike Peters to be keeping awfully good company.”

The National Headliner Awards program, founded in 1934 by Atlantic City’s Press Club, presents medallions to “outstanding writers, photographers, daily newspapers, magazines, graphic artists, radio and television stations and networks, and news syndicates” to honor journalistic merit.

The entire list of 2011 honorees — including multiple Washington Post winners — can be viewed here.