Canberra Times cartoonists David Pope and Geoff Pryor talk about their work

The daily cartoonist with a sharpened - if not poisoned - pen, moving around the edges of the daily news, before pouncing at the end of the day with a devastating, hilarious or thought-provoking blow.

Or perhaps the image should be simpler. The Canberra Times' current cartoonist, David Pope, likens himself to a jester (or a clown or a professional fool) licensed to poke fun.

He speaks hard truth to power, even as he makes you smile.

As he put it: "You are part of the paper but the role is also to be a bit of an outsider, to wander off and not just be a slave to the news of the day - to wander off into left field or right field."

His predecessor, Geoff Pryor, describes his relationship with the politicians he drew as slightly less neutral: "You hope you make them unhappy."

He adds, "I've always resisted being 'duchessed' - being drawn too close".

For 40 years, the two have been the visual commentators on the paper. Sometimes, their comments have been more potent and more memorable than the words alongside.

The Canberra Times has always punched way above its weight with cartoonists. Bigger papers with bigger budgets would have snapped Geoff Pryor and David Pope up, but the two chose to stay.

On June 14, they will be discussing their craft in a special session at the National Library of Australia, which is currently showing a popular exhibition, Inked, of Australian political cartooning through the ages.

Exhibition curator Guy Hansen, who will be moderating the conversation between the two Canberra Times greats, says most newspaper readers have developed a breakfast rapport with political cartoonists over the years, not least because of a cartoon's ability to show another angle.

"I think looking back is quite a nostalgic experience, because it reminds you of that whole process of how you encountered events and politics over all those years," he says.

"Politics is quite depressing at times, and luckily cartoonists let us look at it from a different angle, and often gives us a laugh or an insight which we wouldn't normally get.

"It's a very condensed and powerful and enjoyable type of communication, which is in some ways, I think, much more accessible than broader political writing."

And in Pryor and Pope, the audience has had access to two minds - one from the southside, the other the north, who see the city of Canberra in very specific ways

It's almost like a conversation every day," he says.

"You're having a conversation with somebody, who's bringing the city perspective too. Both Geoff and David grew up in Canberra, so they both understand the city, and they're very in tune with what the various parts of the city think and feel.

"There are many people who come and go from Canberra, but I think both Geoff and David have been committed to the city and believe in the city, and they love Canberra as well, and that comes through their cartoons."

The library event has already almost sold out; there's a special appeal of watching two creative minds discussing their very different approaches to a much-admired craft.

And "craft" is the right word, according to Pryor. He has never been some sort of highfalutin' artist - create a cartoon and move on to the next was his view.

"You can't dwell on it," he says. Even if he had done one with which he was very pleased, the blank sheet still loomed the next day.

He says you need to be able to draw but some cartoons demanded minimal drawing skill - all the impact was in the idea behind them, the punchline.

He regarded himself as a commentator. "It's political comment for people who don't have time to read long op-eds.

"I was doing my job if I could make the spoonful of Corn Flakes pause between bowl and mouth."

The other part of his job - both at The Canberra Times and later, at The Saturday Paper, from which he has recently retired - has been to create unhappiness.

The good cartoonist's eye is ever sharp and sceptical and that demanded distance from its subjects.

He cites the great cartoonist David Low, who migrated from New Zealand via Australia to London, and whose work during the war was so powerful that the Nazis put him on their list of those to be rounded up if they invaded Britain.

"He received the cartoonist's highest accolade - a price on his head," Pryor says.

Pryor didn't always dip his pen in the very strongest acid, not as vicious as that - though he would when the issue riled him (as it did when prime minister John Howard refused to give permission for the Tampa to land in Australia with its 433 refugees - "I got really angry, then," he says).

His main target has been the government, whichever party it happened to me. "The government of the day is the actor. The rest of us are reactors who respond to it," he says.

Some were easier to depict than others: Bob Hawke and John Howard had strong, drawable features ("the eye-brows, the hair bouffant, the jaw" of the Labor man, and "the round head, the feral eye-brows and jutting bottom lip" of his eventual Liberal successor.)

He says as watched politicians age and as their faces got craggier, depicting them got easier. "They never seem to get enough sleep. The easiest are those who age fastest because you don't need to make them look bad. They do it themselves," he says.

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Born and bred in the capital, he joined The Canberra Times in 1978 and stayed until 2008 (on February 29 in a leap year, "so The Canberra Times got an extra day out of me").

By then, he had developed a loyal following and a massive collection of physical drawings - one a day, give or take, for the full 30 years. The vast majority are now in the National Library's collection.

And in stepped David Pope, another Canberra boy who left and did some work in Adelaide and Sydney and then returned home with a sharpened pen and a sharpened mind.

Ink was in his blood from an early age. Growing up in Canberra, he found himself as a child copying Asterix and Peanuts and Tin Tin.

As he grew and became more political, his draftsmanship improved and the lines of the drawing married a message.

Today, the message is what it's about. "First and foremost, it's a political comment," he says.

"It's my opinion. It's not the paper's opinion

"I try not to be seen as a political cheerleader for a political party. I'm on the left but I feel I can criticise Labor.

"Cartoons operate in this weird sub-rational space. They play to emotions and to our sense of playfulness. They attempt to say things that might not be said politely."

They also capture a sentiment in a way that words may find it harder to.

Think of Pope's front page cartoon after the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris where two Islamist gunmen worked their way through the staff of a magazine which had dared publish a cartoon which, in the view of the murderers, was disrespectful to the prophet Mohammed.

"He drew first" was the caption, underlining with the utmost economy the contrast between a cartoonist using a pen and a gunman.

It's an image that went viral; he tweeted it late at night while watching the coverage from Paris unfold on the television, and found his message-box inundated when he woke up in the morning.

Ironically, it was one of the quickest of scribbles, from his perspective, that packed the hardest punch.

But it does show both the power of an image, and the ways in which our words can transcend global boundaries, in a way they didn't in Pryor's day, before social media.

That was just 10 years ago, but the world has changed irrevocably.

It's in keeping, though, with Pope's general modus operandi; though Pope is a political cartoonist, he doesn't do cartoons about the minutiae of politics - the who's up and who's down side of politics.

Rather, he likes big themes like hypocrisy, and beyond the immediate the issues of homelessness, climate change and ethnic relations.

And cartoons, he says, can be "a bit of a blunt instrument".

"We talk about a picture being worth a thousand words, but there's plenty of time where a thousand words beats a picture, hands down," he says.

He recalls one of Pryor's works, from 1997, filed for the Sunday paper the day after the implosion of the Canberra Hospital, during which one of the spectators, 11-year-old Katie Bender, was tragically struck and killed by flying debris.

"He just wanted to acknowledge how everyone felt. So he had this incredibly sombre, wordless piece that was just a piece of rubble on a picnic rug," Pope says.

"That's another way of doing the daily cartoon, it's just acknowledging. It's not necessarily having a big point to make, but acknowledging emotionally where things are at.

"The genre is very flexible, it can be just a gag, it can be a sombre reflection, it can be something that's trying to tell a deeper story."

That said, he doesn't think that cartoons change the world. He's just participating in the wider conversation we all have about the way the country should go.

"Cartoons are one bit of the conversation, and I like to think they are pushing the conversation in a tiny, tiny way," he says.

"That's all I can hope to do." And Canberrans just want him to keep doing it.