Posted in: Comics | Tagged: gosh comics, steve bell

Steve Bell, Signing, Sketching, Available For Work

Steve Bell’s collection If… Stands Up is described as "a new satirical extravaganza from one of Britain’s best-loved political cartoonists"

Steve Bell's new collection of his newspaper strips If… Stands Up is described as "a new satirical extravaganza from one of Britain's best-loved political cartoonists". Best-loved, that is, unless you are on the editorial board of the Guardian newspaper, and then you are ghosted and dumped like yesterday's pixels after forty years.

But Steve Bell, who no longer has a regular cartooning gig, owns his own work and so has been able to collect his last six years' worth of strips for the newspaper in this new book. And what a six years it has been.

"Unmissable highlights include a Jubilee fly-past over Buckingham Palace by Boris Johnson's bottom. Liz Truss taking back control of her own eyeballs. A dead-horse race between zombie 'Treeza' May and pink-rubber fiend David Cameron, towing his bijou shepherd's hut. Rishi Sunak flogging the skeletal remains of Margaret Thatcher. Donald Trump with a golden toilet seat brain. And Keir Starmer, aka Keeves the butler, assuring the toffs that 'the below-stairs movement is realigning its values with those of the British people'. If… Stands Up also keeps a gimlet eye on Charles and the Royals. Bell draws an unforgettable picture of a nation that has left reality behind. Why did the chlorinated chicken cross the Atlantic? Who needs hell when you have the Conservative Party? Might the Labour leadership simply be robots in disguise? In a world of war and chauvinism, Bell picks himself up and goes in search of a new source of laughs. In this, if nothing else, Westminster politics rarely disappoints."

He was signing copies at Gosh Comics in London today (as seen in this month's Things To Do In London). I got a signed and sketched copy. If you want a signed copy you can go here, from Gosh Comics.

I grew up tracing Steve Bell cartoons. His cartoon strip in The Guardian newspaper 'If…' was what I turned to first in the paper my parents bought twice a week. If.. collections at birthdays helped me catch up with what I missed. His Margaret Thatcher was my Margaret Thatcher, eventually, his John Major was my John Major, until I started to work out my own style. So even when I am drawing Keir Starmer, the eagle is his Margaret Thatcher, or at least there is some of him in there.

I chatted to Steve, as he sketched his far superior Keir Starmer on the inside pages. About how he has no regular gigs right now, save for a quarterly commission to keep the wolves from the door. His Guardian contract did he well for many year but, man, he still has every power on hand in those hands of his. He remains a tour de force amongst cartoonists and it feels that someone somewhere must have a place for the great man.

You know, the Guardian is now selling The Observer, the world's oldest Sunday newspaper, to Tortoise Media, the podcast company. Might the Observer want something a bit old-school to bring Guardian readers over to the austere publication?

Oh and then I went to see Dan Slott in Forbidden Planet signing Spider-Boy Volume 1 and Volume 2. It has been a busy day…

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