If... Uncovered
Legendary political cartoonist Steve Bell talks to Anna Trench about the sharp side of his pen
As we approach the next general election, we are especially in need of scathing pen and ink. Political cartoonists can achieve things regular journalists can’t. For one, they can actually draw “shit.” And shit, according to the political cartoonist Steve Bell, is everywhere at the moment. It’s on the radio, on TV, on massive billboards, it is filling column inches by the second. It is at times like these that we need someone to rip the piss mercilessly. Steve Bell is that perfect someone.
If you don’t know the political cartoonist Steve Bell by name, you’re sure to recognize his images. His witty, cruel and bitingly clever pen and ink watercolours have appeared in The Guardian since the eighties. It is he who brought us Blair’s bulging mad left eye, Bush the ape, John Major in oversized underpants and, most recently, Cameron’s shiny pink head squeezed into a condom.
Looking at Bell, it is hard to imagine how such delicate, detailed drawings are produced. He bears a resemblance to Hagrid, with unruly, thick black hair and the slight stoop of someone unusually tall. He mutters and looks away until suddenly out of the blue he roars an enormous guffaw and it is as if a cartoon speech bubble has blown up above his head with a capitalised ‘Hahaha!’ When he draws, he wraps his whole body around a minuscule nib and presses his face close to the paper.
He works in a narrow shed up a hill in Brighton. A million varieties of watercolour clutter his desk and pens, nibs and inkpots spill out of drawers. This shed seems too small to hold him. Yet one shouldn’t be surprised, for this seeming contradiction corresponds exactly to his work: his tiny detailed drawings explode with energy, satirical wit and dozens of references. You could look at them – you could read them – for hours.
Steve Bell was not always an artist. He began as an art teacher. But he was “crap” so he tried his hand at drawing. After a lot of knockbacks, including a rejection from the Beano, he got a hand in some lefty magazines and worked upwards from there. I suggest to him that perhaps what he does now is not so far from teaching. An abashed roar shoots out, and then he mumbles with a smirk “yes… well, educating the population!
Graphic satire has always been about educating. But rather than morbidly moralizing, the graphic satirist takes the piss; he dresses up his social and political commentary in caustic wit and makes it bitterly palatable. Bell is at the forefront of a tradition of graphic satire stretching back to Hogarth. But it is his “utterly political” hero, James Gillray, whom Bell resembles most. Political cartoons have often been regarded as a “lowly art form” but Bell regards himself “as much as an artist as anyone at the Tate or any of those YBA wankers.”
When I ask Bell what the purpose of satire is, he seems at a loss. Then, suddenly, he jumps on it: “It’s about hitting back at all the shit that pours out at us all. You want to get your own back.” He refers to what he does as a “game” with a “target”. “You’re attacking something. It’s a very negative medium. You can’t imagine a positive cartoonist, it would make you want to vomit!”
What the political cartoonist does is “build perception: you’re examining the imagery of what’s going on in the world. Most people don’t understand it. But you get it, you’re mucking about with it and you’re articulating it to your own ends”. Bell is aware that this could give off a hint of self-importance. “Satire demands a base level of arrogance,” he smiles. “We’re necessarily arrogant bastards.”
An awareness of the tradition of satire runs through Bell’s work. Often you find, in the bottom left hand corner of one of his cartoons, a scribbled ‘After Delacroix’, ‘After Rembrandt’, or ‘After Gillray’. In 2001, Bell reworked Gillray’s Light Expelling Darkness… (1795). In Bell’s version, a six-packed, half-naked Blair takes the place of the heroic Pitt; Prescott the British Bulldog and Brown the clumsy elephant replace the British Lion and Hanoverian Horse. Britannia is refigured as Ginger Spice.
This cartoon appears in My Vision For A New You, Bell’s satirical tour of Blair’s final years. Near the Gillray is a homage to Hogarth. Here, Bell “defaces” Hogarth’s 1762 engraving Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism. Blair replaces the fanatic Methodist in the pulpit, Brown becomes the bored and boring clerk, Tories make up the lunatics on the pews; and best of all, Bell transforms Hogarth’s grotesque chandelier into Thatcher’s monstrous face.
One irony of graphic satire is its reliance on the media of the past in its articulation of a message that must be highly contemporary. At a time when the future of print is up in the air, the future of cartoons is equally uncertain. With national newspapers read increasingly online, the images that accompany them in print are being left behind. “Nobody knows where print is going,” Bell sighs.
The picture Bell paints of life in print is a grim one, filled with “bastards trying to steal your rights.” The Guardian is the worst offender in this underhand pillaging of copyright. “This values stuff is such bullshit,” spits Bell. “What The Guardian and other papers are doing is attacking basic standards of journalism by degrading the skills of illustrators, writers and photographers”, when, for example, they get a photo taken with a camera phone or “get a couple of bloggers and take it off the wires – call that newspapers?” Bell shakes his head.
It’s an apocalyptic scene Bell presents: a world where integrity is pinched, the talentless get ahead and “graphic robots” schooled in the “so obviously mechanical” skill of Photoshop fill identical pages. “But,” he concludes, “we’ll never get shot of drawing. It’s such an efficient and wonderfully technologically advanced way to work.” He grins: “All you need is a notepad and a pen.” (And a bit of shit to hit back at.)
Steve Bell’s work is featured daily in The Guardian’s G2 supplement. His book, My Vision For A New You, is out now.
