Newspaper Cartooning

KENT WORCESTER: Posy Simmonds has produced a couple of wonderful graphic novels. Would you be interested in working in a longer format?

STEVE BELL: I would love to try something longer. But realistically I like working in short bursts. Two pages for me is epic length. Besides, these days I have nine deadlines a week -- five strips plus four editorial cartoons. That's enough to keep me busy. There are some graphic novels that I like -- I'm a big fan of Maus, for example, and I very much admire Bryan Talbot's One Bad Rat. But creating comics is so laborious, and at the moment I don't have the luxury of working on something that will take months and months to finish. I admire the preparation involved, of course. But I have a deadline, and I bash away and fill it. It's two different approaches. Sometimes good stuff comes out of the pressure of the deadline. It makes you draw more succinctly. The ideas have to be sharp. Sometimes when I have had too much time, I end up over-elaborating. I prefer working with a short-term deadline. My strips get collected, and at this point I've done about 24 compilation books. In theory I would like try my hand at something different, but I don't know whether it will happen.

WORCESTER: Do you feel exploited by the Guardian?

BELL: [Laughs.] No. I just like doing it. It's a really good job. I wake up and I get to draw satirical pictures of politicians. In recent years I've been working more with color, which I also really enjoy.

WORCESTER: Which do you prefer, the strip or the one-panel editorial cartoon?

BELL: I like them both. The great thing about the strip format is that you can set up jokes. But the editorial cartoons allow for color, and they are appear on the editorial page rather than tucked away at the back. I don't really have a preference.

WORCESTER: Has your work ever appeared in Private Eye?

BELL: For several years in the 1990s I did Christmas covers for Private Eye.

WORCESTER: Why don't you say something about the animation you have done.

BELL: At college I made a short animated film, which is something I've always had an interest in. And in 1984, at the heyday of Thatcherism, I did three animated shorts. The first one was for the Trade Union Resource Center, which is based in Birmingham. The animation was done by Animation City. Following that Channel Four commissioned two animated shorts, one on Thatcher and the other about journalists. I made these with Bob Godfrey, who received an Oscar in the 1970s for an animated film called "Great." Bob is in his 80s by now. Bob always hated Thatcher, so he was keen to work on this project. But Channel Four refused to broadcast the films, which were 10 minutes long, even though they had commissioned them in the first place. A few years later we made three one-minute shorts for the BBC, on nuclear power and Star Wars. These did get shown. At the end of 1987 I helped make a three-minute short about Reagan's war on Nicaragua, called "Send in the Clowns," which got shown on Channel Four. The most recent thing I've done in this area were five three-minute films which were made in conjunction with the 20th anniversary (1999) of Thatcher's coming to power. These were actually broadcast, and they received quite a good reception from the critics.

The trouble with animation is that it is a massive undertaking. Also, it is a collaborative enterprise. Animators tend to draw better than I can, but that does not mean that they always get the look quite right. Working in animation is never quite as satisfying as working in print. That's what I like best about print -- an unmediated way into the paper.

WORCESTER: Can you say something about your fondness for using animals in your comics?

BELL: First off, they work in comic terms. They are easier to draw than people, and you don't have to worry about convincing expressions. I introduced penguins into my strip "If ..." during the Falklands war and got an unusually strong response from readers. I received lots of letters asking me to bring back the penguins. Recently I've been drawing George Bush as a chimp. After all, he does look like a chimp. But I depict him as a quite dangerous chimp. I don't make him cute and loveable. If someone looks like a monkey, why not make the most of it?

Animals can help lighten a strip. When you are attacking someone as the fount of evil, you can get snarled up in your own anger, your own righteousness. It's actually ineffective. Every day wanting to inflict political death. It's much more effective to provide readers with a source of amusement and contempt. You can make politicians look ridiculous. I think Bush is utterly ridiculous. He talks like a monkey -- it's not an exaggeration. I try to keep it as offensive as I can. You got to keep wanting to do it. I've gone a long way beyond wanting to spell out a manifesto. You have to be politically specific, but it's not a political program. It's got to be funny, or at least some wit about it. It's got to function as a cartoon, as an image.

This is why I hate labeling in political cartoons, as if by labeling something "the deficit" or "trade union discontent" you are somehow adding meaning to a drawing. It's an insult to the audience. It doesn't work as politics, either. What you are doing is working with metaphor, you are dealing with clichés and stereotypes. You are trying to upend them, try to come up with something new.

WORCESTER: Has your work become bleaker over the years?

BELL: I don't think so. I should be despondent but I'm not. These are bleak times. Take the recent Iraq war, which was nonsensical. But I still have a level of optimism. I still believe that we can see through these fuckers. They are not beyond defeating. They can be voted out.

WORCESTER: Which contemporary political cartoonists do you admire?

BELL: There are some very good people being published in the press at the moment. Peter Brookes, for example, who works for the Times, is a distinguished illustrator. I wouldn't see eye-to-eye on politics with him, but I admire his work. Dave Brown at the Independent is very good. Unfortunately, Gerald Scarfe has lost some steam recently. The ideas aren't there. When you lose interest in politics you should give up being a political cartoonist. Ralph Steadman, on the other hand, has preserved his anger. He doesn't do a regular strip, but mostly works on books. He does the odd thing for the New Statesman. He says he refuses to draw politicians because he says it only encourages them. If I went along with that I would be out of a job. [Laughs.] His line still has a bit of a bounce in it. And I have always been a great admirer of Cliff Harper, the anarchist cartoonist, as well as Hunt Emerson, of course.

There are some good young people coming up -- Felix Bennett, for example. His cartoons used to appear in the weekly magazine the New Statesman. I did a long stint at the New Statesman myself, before I was doing big editorial cartoons in the Guardian. It was the New Statesman that gave me the chance to work in color on a regular basis, and I came to really appreciate doing watercolor, glazes and washes, and so on. I spent a lot of time using things I had found in painters from the 19th century. I have fond memories of that.

WORCESTER: You recently spent some time at the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists' convention in Pittsburgh. Could you say something about the differences between political cartooning in the U.S. and Britain?

BELL: The great thing about the U.S. is they take themselves more seriously. Over here cartoonists drink and moan about money. To talk about what you do is considered bad form. We are very cynical. The Americans get together and discuss what they are doing, politics, style and so on. At the convention in Pittsburgh there was an interesting debate on style between Ted Rall and Steve Kelly, whose stuff appears in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. It was good fun, because they were willing to take the piss out of each other.

The American house style -- Jeff MacNelly-ish, derived from the likes of Jack Davis -- is set in a time warp, and relies on conventions that were established in the 1960s and 1970s. This kind of cartoon is usually quite dramatically drawn. It also tends to be chatty, heavy on the words. For all that, it's a strong style, but it's been going for a long time and it needs to die. Rall draws in a strange style that diverges from this norm, but he is also a bit chatty. He tends to ramble on, to spell everything out. Not sure I altogether agree with that. But the constraints on U.S. cartoonists are worse than they are in the UK. I can do things in the Guardian that no one could do in the U.S., where there is a stronger emphasis on the importance of not offending the audience.

One of the gods of cartooning is Ronald Searle, who is now in his 80s, living in France. His stuff occasionally appears in Le Monde. He was a prisoner of war in Singapore in WWII, where he would draw on tiny scraps of paper, at great risk to himself. He's the most brilliant of draftsmen. His heyday was in the 1950s and 1960s, and he was one of the best people to appear in Punch, which my parents used to subscribe to. Searle is still one of my heroes. He's an inspiration.

WORCESTER: What do you think of Aaron McGruder?

BELL: Very good. Very sharp. I don't see Boondocks as much as I would like. But McGruder is tackling things directly. I was initially slightly put off by the style, which is a little cozy, but when you read it you see it isn't cozy.

WORCESTER: What about Garry Trudeau?

BELL: I see his stuff everyday because it runs in the Guardian, along with "If ...". I'm a great admirer of Trudeau's work. I don't like the drawing. But I like his writing, his ear, his deadpan ability to sum up an issue. His work is very clean -- no body parts. But it is funny, which helps. He has a long-running cast of characters, which he uses well. Rarely shows politicians directly.

I still occasionally read the Beano. But most comics are bloody hard to read. It's actually hard work. I got to about page 30 in Chris Ware's graphic novel. But it is so fucking dense. There's a certain amount of effort required. So I end up reading novels. [Laughs.] I loved Palestine, by Joe Sacco, however.

WORCESTER: Future plans?

BELL: I would love to attend an American political convention. I'd like to sit in on both the Democratic and the Republican conventions. There are a lot of things I don't quite understand about U.S. politics, so from that point of view, it would be quite interesting.

Something that enthralls me is comics journalism, like Joe Sacco's work. Drawn commentary. I've been doing things like the party conference sketchbook, which you can see on the Guardian's website. You can take a sketchbook anywhere you go, and with the help of a laptop computer and a scanner you can send any sketch you like across the globe. I'm very interested in using cartoons as journalism and commentary. Other than that, as far as my future plans goes, who knows? Whatever comes up.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #272.]

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