Pocatello cartoonist and retired art teacher Bob Beason was extra upset when he heard about the massacre inside the offices of the French weekly, Charlie Hebdo, this week.

    Among the 12 people killed were eight staff members, many of them political cartoonists just like Beason.

    “It's just crazy,” Beason said. “There is so much hate and anger in the world.”

    Charlie Hebdo specialized in biting satire and targeted the political right, popular culture, Catholicism, Judaism and Islam. The magazine’s lampooning of the Prophet Mohammed likely sparked Wednesday morning’s deadly attack by two men armed with assault rifles. As they left the scene of the massacre, amateur video captured them shouting: “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad” in French and “God is great” in Arabic.

    French police killed the two attackers during a shootout Friday. They were brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, and they were affiliated with the Islamic extremist organization al-Qaida.

    Beason said it’s the job of a good cartoonist to drive home a point of view.

    “It’s a way to an exclamation point on your views,” Beason said. “It doesn’t mean I want to be shot for it.”

    Beason has drawn many political cartoons over the years, and several were published in the Journal. His harshest cartoons targeted former Idaho Superintendent of Public Schools Tom Luna.

    One pictured Luna as a hunter gutting a deer hanging from a tree with the words “Idaho Public Schools” written on the side of the deer. Another pictured Luna as half-man, half-robot with the robot side hooked to a computer.

    “I have to find something that’s recognizable to people,” Beason said about his cartoon subject matter. “It has to be something to make them notice it.”

    He said the key to a good cartoon is its ability to evoke a response in people and hopefully make them think.

    Beason started creating cartoon characters when he was in junior high. He would trace human bodies in biology texts and then put super hero outfits on them.

    “My first real character was Repulso,” Beason said with a chuckle.

    By the time he was a junior in high school, Beason knew he wanted to pursue art as a career. He received his degree from Idaho State University and went to work as an art teacher — first in Wells, Nev., and then at Hawthorne Junior High and Pocatello High School before retiring in 2009.

    He said during his 23 years at Hawthorne, one of his most popular classes was cartoon drawing. In fact, the products of his class was cause for an inside joke when Beason was nominated for a teaching award from the J.R. Simplot Company.

    He didn’t win, but a spokesman for Simplot said he knew he was in for a tough public relations job when he came across a full page in the Journal filled with cartoons about pollution at Simplot’s Don Plant in Pocatello. The cartoons were all done by Beason’s junior high students.

    Beason said it’s in a cartoonist’s nature not to back away from controversy.

    Currently, Beason is working on a comic strip called “Mascot.” The strip is about violence on college campuses. And it deals with the dark subject of a female student being attacked then finding frustration when she tries to get help from police and campus officials.

    “The emphasis is on how little is done about these attacks,” Beason said. “I use the opportunity to educate people.”

    As far as cartoonists going after people with power, Beason sees that as a fair target.

    “You have to have a thick skin if you’re in a position of power,” he said. “The people at the Paris paper were skewering everyone. No one was left untouched. I think it was brave of them to not fear repercussions.”

    When he’s not drawing cartoons, Beason works with son-in-law James Schmidt at Captain Bengal’s Comic Cove, which he opened two years ago on N. Third Street in Pocatello.

    “My daughter married a nerd and we’ve been having a lot of fun,” Beason said.