Beard Liberation Front sends hirsute greetings to Steve Bell on 40 years of Guardian cartoons
4th November
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has sent hirsute greetings to Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell as he marked 40 years of cartoons on the paper on 3rd November with a strip depicting Angela Rayner’s demolition of Johnson at Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions.
The last ‘If’ cartoon strip for the Guardian appeared on 29th April and he started drawing it in November 1981. He stills draws one off cartoons for the paper.
While Bell is far from history his cartoons 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.
Bell has noted (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
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said Steve Bell’s Beard Power has endured 40 years of clean shaven revisionist politics and his work still has the power to make the powerful bristle
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