Denise Paine, director of enterprise sales for CenturyLink in Boston, has found a way to use her considerable cartooning talent to help lighten her co-workers’ spirits in the current tough times.
CenturyLink used one of her cartoons to illustrate the company’s provision, at no cost, of a broadband ship-to-shore connection to hospital ship Mercy in Los Angeles. But that was just the tip of the cartooning iceberg, as it were.
Paine told Multichannel News she has started doing daily cartoons and circulating them to most of the eastern U.S. CenturyLink team. “I’ve been publishing these for my region for several months,” she said, “[and] with the most recent COVID situation, I moved this to daily.”
Paine is in good company. Using humor as a way to cope with the stresses of war has a notable antecedent in Bill Mauldin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who raised the spirits of GI’s in World War II.
Paine is herself a veteran (note her salute at right to the front line COVID-19 fighters). “I did daily comics when I was in the military, deployed to combat zones (she is a former Military Intelligence Officer), and when I was attached to the Navy,” she said.
Not surprisingly, she is a multiple cartoon award winner in the Maj. Gen. Keith L. Ware Awards for Military Journalism.
“I love to use my talent to calm and inspire people, which I feel is so essential right now,” she said.
