Thirty years of Steve Bell

It’s thirty years since the first If… cartoon drawn by Steve Bell appeared in The Guardian, so beginning the insidious process of  warping a whole generation’s perceptions of politicians. In the paper today, Bell recalled how he began cartooning whilst having a day job as a teacher.  But the stress of that job drove him into full-time freelance cartooning: ‘I knew things had gone too far when being off to have my wisdom teeth taken out felt like a relief’.

He had begun drawing strip cartoons and illustrations, unpaid, for Birmingham Broadside, the city’s answer to Time Out.  Then he found work writing and drawing children’s comics.  After introducing a strip about a really obnoxious supreme being, Lord God Almighty, at the leftwing publication, The Leveller, he was taken on at Time Out in 1979, immediately after the election of Margaret Thatcher, when they were looking for a comic strip to tackle the new Tory government. That’s when Maggie’s Farm began:

Steve Bell:

I came to realise, while drawing her over the first year of her government, that she was deranged, but in a very controlled way, and this was expressed in her eyeballs. Her utter self-belief, her total conviction of her own rightness, went way beyond arrogance. She was mad. Perhaps I subconsciously empathised with her for this. Even so, I hated her more than any other living being. Within a couple of years, she had managed to triple unemployment, slash services and lay waste to vast tracts of British industry.

Then, in November 1981, Bell got his big break when the first If… strip appeared in The Guardian:

The first published strip, Monday November 2nd 1981. (‘The Borgias’ was a BBC blockbuster series of the time.)

The strip really took off with the the Falklands War, five months later. A Royal Naval Taskforce was dispatched to recapture the islands from the Argentinians; on the armoured punt HMS Incredible that sailed south with the Task Force in April 1982 was Able Seaman Reg Kipling in company with Commander Jack Middletar:

As they neared the Falklands Kipling became increasingly disaffected with the whole enterprise and began fraternizing with the local birdlife, most notably the Penguin, who later returned to these shores and who, anarchic and cynical, has cropped up occasionally ever since.

There has been something to enjoy almost every day since, either in the If… strip or the comment page cartoon.

Steve Bell has studied politicians up close; his conclusion:

These men and women are professional idealists and I take my hat off to them. Then I kick them up the arse. Because it’s not what they say or what they are, or even what they say they are, that gets my goat: it’s the things they actually do to us in our name.