Steve Bell (cartoonist)
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| Steve Bell | |
 At Dundee University
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| Born | 26 February 1951 Walthamstow, London, UK |
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| Occupation | Political cartoonist, artist |
Steve Bell (born 26 February 1951) is an English political cartoonist, whose work appears in The Guardian and other publications. He is known for his left-wing views and distinctive caricatures.
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[edit] Early life
Born in Walthamstow, London and raised in Slough, Bell moved to North Yorkshire with his family in 1968, where he trained as an artist at the Teesside College of Art. He graduated in film-making and art at the University of Leeds in 1974 and trained as an art teacher at St Luke's College, Exeter, (nowadays University of Exeter - St. Luke's Campus) in 1975. He taught art for one year in Birmingham before becoming a freelance cartoonist in 1977. His comic strip Maggie's Farm appeared in the London listings magazines Time Out from 1979 and later in City Limits, and Lord God Almighty appeared in The Leveller in the 1970s. In 1980, he contributed a cartoon interpretation of the lyrics to Ivan Meets G.I. Joe to the inner lyric bag of The Clash's triple album Sandinista!.
[edit] Cartoonist
Steve Bell is probably best known for the daily strip called If..., which has appeared in The Guardian newspaper since 1981, and since the mid-1990s he has also been that newspaper's principal editorial cartoonist. One of Bell's most traditional caricatures is of John Major as a dire superhero wearing his Y-fronts on the outside of his clothes. The Y-front caricature first appeared in a special 2 page cartoon in the Saturday "Guardian Weekend" supplement in early December 1990, a couple of weeks after John Major became Prime Minister. It was clearly inspired by the Superman comic, wherein Superman wears sleek red briefs over a blue body stocking. John Major, in the form of a SuperUselessman, bursts out of a telephone kiosk wearing aertex Y-fronts over the top of a grey suit. A number of journalists subsequently claim to have seen John Major's shirt tucked into his underpants, including Alastair Campbell, the former Daily Mirror political editor who became Tony Blair's chief spin doctor. He claims that he gave Steve Bell the idea. This is entirely untrue as the cartoon appeared before the first rumours about shirts being tucked into underpants ever surfaced. Major has never confirmed or denied that he tucks his shirt into his underpants and naturally refuses to answer questions on the subject. Of the whole question of underpants he is reported as saying, in the Anthony Seldon biography of Major, that: "It is designed to destabilise me so I ignore it." Bell also claims to be the first cartoonist to have spotted Margaret Thatcher's mad left eye, as well as the fact that Tony Blair shares this unusual feature.
Steve Bell has won many awards for his work, including both the political and strip cartoon categories at the Cartoon Arts Trust awards at least eight times since 1997. Many collections of his cartoons have been published, and he has also illustrated original books in collaboration with several authors. He has made short animated films with Bob Godfrey, including a short series of animated cartoons for Channel 4 television in 1999 to mark the 20th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's rise to power, entitled Margaret Thatcher - Where Am I Now?. He has appeared in a radio programme about the life of 18th century caricaturist James Gillray. Earlier in his career he wrote and drew the Gremlins comic strip for the British comic Jackpot.
In 2003, he was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy. When he received the UK Press Gazette award in 2004 for Best Cartoonist, in his speech he thanked "George Bush - for looking like a monkey, walking like a monkey and talking like a monkey".
Opinions are divided about the merits of Steve Bell's work. Like most cartoonists he uses running gags, and therefore seems funnier to regular than to occasional readers. But even among Guardian aficionados, there was an ongoing Bell vs Garry Trudeau (and therefore If... vs Doonesbury) debate, occasionally spilling onto the paper's Letters page, which existed mainly because the two comic strips were, for many years, carried by the Guardian adjacent to each other. Steve Bell is a great admirer of the Doonesbury strip, not least because the only reason he found work at The Guardian was because the then editor, Peter Preston was looking for a home grown strip to run alongside it. The debate was as much about taste as anything else, prompted for example by Bell's typical juxtaposition of toilet humour with high art. He is fond of parodying famous paintings. Examples include his parody of Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (in an editorial cartoon about the UK Independence Party); William Hogarth's The Gate of Calais about the ban on UK meat exports following outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease and bovine BSE; and - before the 2005 General Election when it briefly seemed as if the Liberal Democrats might seriously threaten Labour - J.M.W. Turner's The Fighting Temeraire, in which a chirpy Charles Kennedy as tug-boat towed a grotesque and dilapidated Tony Blair to be broken up [1]. Bell is also fond of using the pejorative British word "wanker" and its euphemistic variants in his If... comic strip.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Guardian cartoons by Steve Bell
- The Art of Comedy, an interview with Steve Bell, from suchsmallportions.com
- Interview alongside Martin Rowson
- Interviewing Robert Crumb, 2005
- Biography article at British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent
