chubby cheeks

My interview with Steve Bell, published in this week's Big Issue in the North, available over the fold.

Spring is here and Steve Bell, the Great Bearded Shark of political cartoonists, smells warm, fresh meat in the water.

“Speaking as a human being I’m not in the least looking forward to a Conservative government. Speaking as a political cartoonist, on the other hand, I think it could be quite a good thing.

And let’s face it, New Labour are just clapped out. Old and tired.”

There are apparently only so many times you can draw a hundredweight of coal being thrown into a cellar and label it “Gordon Brown.” But how’s Dave coming on? Nailed him yet?

“Ah, yes. Cameron. Lots to enjoy there. He’s a sort of cherub, isn’t he? Almost classically upper class.”

On the other hand he’s probably the most bum-faced man in British public life since James Anderton ran the Greater Manchester Police Force in the 1980s, providing Bell with plenty of pale, plump meat for the pen in the process. “Oh, yes. Wonderful chubby cheeks he has. Very chubby cheeks…”

Finally getting someone right in all senses of the word – comprehensively nailing them – can be a slow process, he explains. “Cartooning is an attack medium, but you don’t just charge in. You respond to what’s in front of you, to whatever crops up. I’m not the sort of cartoonist who does an off the cuff caricature and leaves it at that. There’s the way politicians look, the policies they come up with, how they respond to events. It’s part appearance, part character, part ideas…so you just sit there in the attic updating the picture of Dorian Gray.”

Visitors to Liverpool’s Writing on the Wall festival will get the chance to see in person something of how this is done on May 5, when Bell will be holding what is billed as an illustrated lecture on how he evolves and develops his characters.

In fact Bell’s characters don’t seem to develop so much as degenerate. His Thatcher started out as a cruel and unusual Prime Minister and went from there to resemble Norman Bates’ mother, only livelier. Blair went from being an anxious vicar to a sort of crazed Masonic pyramid, complete with mad, staring eye.

Steve Bell’s current attic is the Guardian newspaper, for whom he has produced the If…cartoon strip since the early eighties and where he now resides in some splendour on the op ed page.

After coming to the editor’s attention through the Maggie’s Farm strip published in the now defunct radical London listings magazine City Limits, Bell was originally hired by the Guardian as a domestic companion to the paper’s US cartoonist Doonesbury. While Doonesbury’s sharp, progressive take on US politics fits in pretty well with the average Guardian readers, so does his comparatively sedate cartooning. For all that his politics may be congenial to Guardian readers, there’s something about Bell's style that doesn’t seem to sit too well with the paper’s generally earnest attitude.

“I did used to get quite a number of disapproving letters, though these days I don’t – I get emails slagging me off instead” he says. “It has been said that I’m the kind of Id of the Guardian, running around waving my arms in the air while everyone else is having these deliberations. I don’t know, to be honest.

“A lot of cartoonists work in the office and have the editor over their shoulder making suggestions about what subjects to cover. The great thing about the people at the Guardian is that they let me stay at home and get on with it.”

These days the cartoonists’ lair reachesout to the world at large through the home pages of the newspapers he publishes in, which tends to add to the impact of the work for good or ill. Bell’s portrayal of former President Bush as a chimpanzee not only drew complaints from outraged rightwingers about the caricature itself but about disrespect for the office of the presidency, pointing to a cultural difference between British and US cartooning styles.

“I don’t think there’s anything necessarily softer about American political cartooning” says Bell. “It can be just as sharp, aggressive or ironic as anything you see in Britain or elsewhere. I think there are greater commercial and editorial restraints in some cases that limit what people are able to do: you can’t get away with all the stuff involving bodily fluids.

As for Bush, everybody seems to forget one important thing: he looks like a chimp.”

By contrast, Bell draws President Obama comparatively straight: a pipe cleaner with gravitas. Not going soft, are we? “Obama doesn’t actually give you very much – no tell-tale gestures or expressions, nothing to get a hook into. He’s very self-possessed.

I don’t think I’m getting soft, though you have to remember that I’ve been doing this for thirty years now, hanging around conferences staring at politicians, and you can’t maintain a permanent level of outrage through all that period. I started out cartooning with Thatcher and thinking about her today still makes my teeth ache, but you can’t fake hatred. Well you can, but the results will be pretty disastrous. Cartoons have to have their origin in genuine feeling. It goes back to what I said about reacting to what’s actually there.”

Perhaps the best example of that is Bell’s portrayal of John Major as crap superman, shirt tucked into y -fronts worn outside the trousers, face faintly but permanently peeved. Where his Thatcher appealed to the many already inclined to hate her, Bell’s Major seemed to sum up his prime ministership to the country at large. Major himself studiously ignored what he saw as an attempt by the opposition to destabilise him, though he reportedly asked to buy copies of the originals to contemplate during retirement.

British politicians have been portrayed as a pack of rogues and scoundrels since caricaturists like Gillray and Rowlandson first dipped their nibs in bile 200 years ago. Though staunch leftwingers, both Bell and his colleague and rival Martin Rowson hark back consciously to that riotous libertarian tradition. It all makes for good, knockabout stuff, but is there ever a worry that a cartoon which seeks to illustrate a complex issue will be reduced to “look at the funny man?”

“It doesn’t worry me. I mean, I go for the laughs, I’m happy to have them, and there’s no reason why you can’t get a laugh and be acute as well, though of course it doesn’t always happen.”

That’s the voice of a veteran. Most of the people who grew up with his cartoons still think of Bell as the angry young radical of Maggie’s farm. But, like the rest of us, he’s grown older. It’s hard to think of who will eventually replace him, and with internet based media eating the newspaper business model alive, in what context a new generation might come along.

“New media is going to make a big difference. I’ve sen people do amazing things with stuff like flash animation. So creatively these are interesting times. But the main problem with new media is how people are going to get paid. There’s a so-called progressive blog in the States called the Huffington Post which is proud of not paying its contributors. That’s progressive?

“On a personal level I always wanted to be a cartoonist, and I was sort of propelled into political cartooning by outrage” he says. “But that doesn’t last. If you’re going to do this over the long haul you have to grow into it, there’s a long apprenticeship. It’s not something an angry seventeen year old can expect to just go ahead and do. Drawing horrible pictures of politicians for a living takes a certain arrogance, and you have to learn that through experience.”

Comments

[septicisle]

It is fairly apparent that he's lost his anger - I pick up the yearly collections of his strips when I find them, and the ones from the 80s are so superior to the current If... that it's almost painful. That said, his op-eds are still usually brilliant; today's is especially good.

[Alex]

He's struggled since Blair quit, and Bush going as well doesn't help. Really, he got Blair like few others did.

I'm increasingly sympathetic to the idea that the culture needs a phase of Toryism to revive - like one of those forests that needs to burn every now and then to fertilise its seeds - but the collateral damage, and dear God, the fucking people...

Does anyone have any ideas? Seriously. The Tories are simply unacceptable, even as an alternative to goulash Blairism.

[Chris Williams]

Hmm. . . you wouldn't be a LibDem candidate would you Alex?

As for ideas, I wouldn't start from here if I was you. Or indeed me. In an ideal world, Labour's would come out of this fiasco having realised that blowing away your own core support, on the basis that there are no credible rivals on the left, doesn't deliver _either_. 13 years of power, and what have they actually achieved that Ken Clarke couldn't have done in more style?

We may have forgotten that the Tories are still tories, but they are about to remind us of this: they're a shoe-in for the next election, but I might take a punt on them losing the one term.

Brown's on a downward spiral in any case: all the crap that happens in the next year is going to stick to Labour. The best thing that he could do for the party is engineer a crisis now and call a general election which he will lose, rather than limping to the time limit with his credibility in Majorian tatters. The only way is down, so they may as well eject now.

[Alex]

I'm not a candidate for anything at the moment. Except for a good kicking. And really, do I have any commitment to the Liberals? I don't even really read Liberal blogs.

[merrick]

"the culture needs a phase of Toryism to revive"

When does the revival begin, given that we've have unbroken Toryism since 1979?

[Guano]

Steve Bell was in "The Leveller" as well. That was good stuff.

[Phil]

And really, do I have any commitment to the Liberals?

Well, I think you do.

[guthrie]

Having the If.. books from the 80's and 90's, lovingly tracked down in 2nd hand bookshops, my opinion is that whilst Bell may be getting older and losing his fire, it is depressing to see the simple themes which he portrayed in the 80's being repeated. Financial meltdown, violence in foreign countries in good old fashioned imperialist style, billions hungry and lacking resources, the ongoign battle of the rich versus poor (The rich won), political lies and spin etc etc.