Charles Werner was born in Wisconsin. In 1930 Werner secured a job as a staff artist with the Springfield (Mo.) Leader and Press, where he also served as a photographer and reporter. In 1935 he received an offer to join the art department of the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City. In 1937 he became that newspaper's editorial cartoonist. Werner rose from an unknown rookie to a national celebrity with a single cartoon published in his second year at the Oklahoman. Entitled "Nomination for 1938" and published on 6 October 1938, the cartoon was a bitter comment on the transfer of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Germany by the Munich Agreement signed a week before by Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler, and it brought Werner journalism's highest award, the Pulitzer Prize, in 1939. Werner's cartoons for the Sun were well received nationally, and during his time with the paper he served as president of the Headliners Club of Chicago, but his relations with the paper were not comfortable. Werner became the Indianapolis Star's editorial cartoonist in 1947 until he retired in 1994. Werner observed that a “political cartoon should never applaud; it should scorn . . . should ridicule . . . should put the subject in an awkward position"
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