In January of 1978, Ed Stein gave up on his lifelong dream of becoming a caped superhero. Realizing that he couldn’t fly, but that he could draw, he joined the staff of the Rocky Mountain News as its editorial cartoonist.

This proved to be a good career move because, although he still can’t fly, his cartoons, which are syndicated to daily newspapers by Universal Uclick, have appeared in all the really important publications, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, USA Today, US News and World Report and People magazine.

Stein has won a number of awards for his cartoons, including the 2006 John Fischetti Award, the Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Award, the Dragonslayer Award and numerous Colorado Society of Professional Journalists and Colorado Press Association Awards. His work also has been honored by the Headliner Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Award and the Best of the West Award. Most recently, he received the 2009 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, for his cartoons about torture and the economy. For reasons no one has ever been able to explain, he has been stiffed repeatedly by the East Coast media elites in charge of handing out the Pulitzer Prize, which he clearly deserves. He probably would have won it if he could fly.

In 1997 he began drawing Denver Square, a daily comic strip about a fictional family living in Denver. The strip was named for a type of house common to older Denver neighborhoods, which was home to the comic strip family. He ended the strip in 2008 to spend more time with his real family.

His daily comic strip, Freshly Squeezed, is distributed by Universal Uclick.

Two collections of his work have been published: Stein’s Way, a collection of his editorial cartoons, and Denver Square; We Need a Bigger House, a compendium of Denver Square comic strips.

Stein is a former president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and is a member of the National Cartoonists Society. He lives in Denver with his wife, filmmaker Lisa Hartman, Max the dog and Bagheera the cat. His children, Gabriel and Natasha, are off doing whatever college students do, and he doesn’t really want to know the details.

Since the demise of the Rocky, the first major American newspaper (We’re number one! Yay!) to go under in this recession, Stein is continuing to draw editorial cartoons for Universal, drumming up commissions as a freelance artist and writer, and spending all the extra spare time he suddenly has practicing his takeoffs and landings.