Finnish art - Jouko Innanen 1

Jouko Innanen (1952-2019) was a hugely prolific Finnish editorial cartoonist.

While studying architecture in Espoo, Innanen began drawing cartoons for the local paper Länsiväylä in 1981. This soon became a full-time career. From 1984 to 1987 he was a staff cartoonist at Uusi-Suomi in Helsinki, and after that he started freelancing cartoons for many various publications around the country. Most notably among them the national tabloid paper Iltalehti (for which he did five editorial cartoons a week) and regional papers like Turun Sanomat and Länsi-Savo.

Jouko's cartoons (those for Länsiväylä signed as "Joke") are known for their slick and confident brush line and clever use of half-tones. Innanen found zipatone too expensive for daily use already in the late 80s so he deviced a number of workarounds that allowed him not to do the tones on his actual originals. Before doing them on the computer since the the mid-90s, he figured out a complicated, but functional method of doing the tones with paper cut-out overlays and a photocopier.

At his peak, Innanen produced 14 editorial cartoons a week (at most, three a day) and still other miscellaneous cartoon assignments on top of that, such as comics and cartoons for trade publications like Hyvä Kauppa, and illustrations for the annual news anthology book Mitä Missä Milloin.