‘If’ cartoonist Steve Bell makes social history
It’s the last ‘If’ cartoon strip for the Guardian today(29th April) although Bell has held out the prospect in an interview with Press Gazette that it might continue elsewhere- pending a suitable offer. He also noted that doing a colour cartoon strip four days a week- which he has been doing for 40 years at the Guardian- is a lot of work and he and his beard turned 70 earlier this year.
He is not though of course giving up or retiring but will be drawing one off cartoons for the paper. While the Guardian’s issues with some of Bell’s cartoons- which have a long history (see link below) are well known Bell pointed out to Press Gazette that the reason for the change and his new contract with the paper was due to financial constraints particularly in the COVID era.
Anyway while Bell is not history his cartoons certainly form part of the social history of Britain since the 1970s.
I first came across his work while teaching in Birmingham in the late 1970s (Bell had been doing the same- though I did history and politics not art) when he drew a strip in the Birmingham Broadside one of a number of alternative press publications that then flourished in the UK post 1968.
His Maggies Farm strip (first in Time Out then City Limits) was an important part of the left’s reaction to Thatcher while his Lord God Almighty cartoons for the Leveller were equally striking.
Then of course came If. The characters and caricatures are a commentary on modern times. The penguins and Kipling are from the Falklands era but are in today’s last strip, Major with his underpants displayed firmly outside and the Inner London Wildlife branch of the Labour Party- again still going and very much needed in times like these.
As Bell has noted(again see link) while print culture is held to be in decline (the print edition of the Guardian doesn’t sell much more than 100,000 on average and that figure is boosted by a much higher sale for the Saturday edition) we live in an increasingly visual culture and cartoons are ideally suited to it.
So not only has Steve Bell made history his cartoons will continue to do so.
https://www.cartoons.ac.uk/cartoonist-biographies/a-b/SteveBell.html
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