Despite magazine's exit, she's still drawn to Boston

There is something of the 8-year-old in Sage Stossel. Her lean limbs toss playfully about as she walks. When still, her bright eyes bounce around the room. Child-sized clothes could fit her small frame.

And like any 8-year-old, she loves cartoons.

Stossel, 35, has been creating cartoons regularly since she was an undergrad at Harvard. Her comic strip "Jody" graced the pages of the Harvard Crimson during her four years at the school, and her work has since appeared in periodicals around the world.

But it's the Atlantic Monthly that her cartoons call home.

Two years ago, the magazine was uprooted from its Boston birthplace and moved to Washington, D.C., to be closer to its sister magazine, the National Journal. Stossel did not want to move. She grew up in Boston's suburbs, lives in Cambridge, and has long felt an affinity for the area.

"If I hadn't grown up here, I probably would've ended up here anyway," she mused. She even wrote and illustrated a poem about her favorite place in Cambridge, which was published as the children's book "We're Off to Harvard Square" in 2004.

So, as other Atlantic staffers packed up and made the move to the Watergate building, Stossel and five other contributors sat tight in Boston. She was never specifically asked to move, she says, so she stayed.

Their stubbornness was rewarded this summer, when the Atlantic Media Co. set them up with a new Boston office near North Station.

Taking a break from unpacking on a muggy afternoon, Stossel grabbed a hot coffee. Her tawny hair fell without fuss, framing her large glasses. Her skin is also tawny and as smooth as, well, an 8-year-old's.

Stossel, who is also the Atlantic's online editor and the magazine's archivist, shares the Boston space with the senior editor and food critic, Corby Kummer, and the poetry editor, David Barber.

Some of Stossel's works may, at first glance, look like those of other political cartoonists. Harvard University professor Leo Damrosch, who teaches a class on wit and humor, thought so -- initially. But looking closer at several of her cartoons, he commented that some involve genuine reporting. One of them, which appeared in The Boston Globe, consisted of a series of drawings, with captions, from the Head of the Charles Regatta.

Damrosch also contrasted Stossel's "wit" against the mean-spirited satire that he said characterizes most political cartoons.

Stossel's brother, Scott, explained that his sister isn't a deeply political person. She has insights on a variety of subjects and therefore has a broader appeal. "She is just looking for what's funny, where the absurdity is, not what political point she can score," he said.

Her genius seems to lie in her observations of what's going on around her. She likes to take her sketchpad to events and take cartoon notes on the scene. She also is steeped in current events, reading mainstream newspapers, listening to the radio, and simply working within what former deputy editor Toby Lester calls the Atlantic's "echo chamber of news."

Lester spoke of Stossel's creativity as a prism through which events are reflected from new angles. He agreed that Stossel may be better described as a comic reporter than a political cartoonist.

In an e-mail, Stossel explained, "I've heard a lot of cartoonists, especially political cartoonists, say they cartoon about things that make them angry, but I tend to look more for what strikes me as absurd."

Audiences are responding to this less biased approach. One fan, Marc Oxborrow of Arizona, wrote that browsing her archived cartoons on the Atlantic website was "like eating potato chips -- hard to stop once you get started!"

Judy Hines, who helps run an annual Washington-based cartoon auction to benefit teen journalists, wrote that she liked Stossel's cartoons because they offer a "creative take on political and social issues that are funny in unpredictable ways."

The Atlantic, celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, was started by local heavyweights such as Harvard alum Ralph Waldo Emerson and Cambridge resident Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Amid a plethora of pro-British periodicals, the magazine's founders strove to "create a distinctly American voice," wrote Cullen Murphy, the magazine's managing editor until 2005 and current editor-at-large of Vanity Fair.

In 1857, the first edition vowed to always "deal frankly with persons and parties. . . [and] keep in view that moral element which transcends all . . ."

From the beginning, the magazine set aside a place for humor. It was the first to publish Mark Twain's stories. And the first to give Sage Stossel's pen-and-ink cartoons an international audience.

Even as an 8-year-old, Stossel's comics were more social observation than attacks. She drew mice at parties making snobbish comments, such as complaining about the gin's poor taste. Today, she uses what her brother calls her "oddball sensibility" to further the Atlantic's founding purpose.

She uses her art to cut through the double talk on both sides, as a way of keeping everyone honest, Lester said.

"No one," he said, "is spared her critical eye."

Sage Stossel's cartoons can be found at theatlantic.com/doc/index/sage_ink.

Robin Nixon can be contacted at robinnixon@hotmail.com.