I had expected an ordered environment, rather than the haphazard office and front room, which, I was assured, concealed an extensive filing system. After all, Shapiro produces six editorial cartoons a week, four for the Sowetan and one each for the Mail & Guardian and the Sunday Times. But then I had also expected the creator of these cartoons to be seven feet tall, with a frame matching his stature in the cartooning world.

For Shapiro, the Madiba years have made cartooning far more difficult. A self-described "activist cartoonist" in the 1980s, he had a clear target to needle with his razor-sharp pen nib - the Apartheid government.

However, since 1994 things have been a little more complicated. "Very quickly things became more and more nuanced, and I feel it's become more and more difficult since then to be a cartoonist. The changes affect everybody. How you think. How you write. How clear-cut your targets are.

"As a cartoonist, if you do too many things that are kind of praise-singing, it gets a bit boring and it gets a little bit sycophantic. So you tend to go for things where you can satirise more and be a bit more outrageous. In the old days doing that kind of stuff would mean that you were almost automatically going for people that you can't stand and are really doing the bad stuff, which was clearly the Apartheid regime."

That the "bad guys" are not always quite as blatantly bad as the members of the previous government is not the only problem with post-1994 South Africa.

"Now you find when things like corruption start happening, where people are inactive where they should be active in solving certain problems, these are the kind of things that you have to target."

Being a cartoonist is evidently not all fun and games. "I have to be sometimes funny, sometimes hard-hitting, sometimes witty. [One] must try to balance funny cartoons with serious issues."

From Cape Town, Shapiro creates for the Johannesburg-based Sowetan, the country's biggest daily, which has a predominantly black readership. Although he acknowledges that there are differences between black and white popular culture he prefers to do cartoons that would work for any of the three newspapers he draws for. "There is a tendency to patronise your readers if you worry too much about it."

On the technological front, Shapiro admits to lagging a little. "I've been a little slow to be dragged into the hi-tech age." Although having recently acquired some of the software suitable for his trade, he still sticks to the good old ink dipping pen and the smooth surface of bristle board. And even though one should soon be able to access Zapiro on the Internet, with plans for a site on the drawing board, his cartoons still cross the country via the fax machine. "I think I've developed quite a tight drawing style partly because of the constraints of newspapers and faxing ... In some ways, my drawing style has improved by these constraints."

Clearly, cartooning is not just a matter of "what do I feel like today?" Although Shapiro admits to having a "great degree" of control over what he deals with in his editorial cartoons, there seems to be a strong moral compulsion to portray things as they are, and not simply as they seem. As it was put in an article in Time magazine, "Behind every comic artist is the long shadow of a moralist."