Steve Bell (cartoonist)
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- For the Canadian musician, see Steve Bell (musician).
Steve Bell (born February 26, 1951) is an English political cartoonist, whose work appears in The Guardian and other places. He is known for his left-wing views and distinctive caricatures.
Born in Walthamstow, London and raised in Slough, Bell moved to North Yorkshire with his family in 1968, where he trained as an artist at the Teesside College of Art as well as the University of Leeds. He was briefly an art teacher in Birmingham before becoming a freelance cartoonist in 1977. His comic strip Maggie's Farm appeared in the London listings magazines Time Out from 1979 and later in City Limits. In 1980, he contributed a cartoon interpretation of the lyrics to Ivan Meets G.I. Joe to the inner lyric bag of The Clash's triple album Sandinista!.
Steve Bell is perhaps best-known for the daily strip called If..., which has appeared in The Guardian newspaper since 1981, and since the mid-1990s he has also been that newspaper's principal editorial cartoonist. One of Bell's most traditional caricatures is of John Major as a dire superhero wearing his Y-fronts on the outside of his clothes (and indeed Major later admitted he tucked his shirt into his underwear). He has won many awards for his work, including both the political and strip cartoon categories at the Cartoon Arts Trust awards in 1997.
Many collections of his cartoons have been published, and he has also illustrated original books in collaboration with several authors. He has made short animated films with Bob Godfrey, and a radio programme about the life of 18th century caricaturist James Gillray. He has also drawn the Gremlins comic strip for the British comic Jackpot.
In 2003, he was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy. When he received the award in 2004 for Best Daily Cartoonist, in his speech he thanked "George Bush - for looking like a monkey, walking like a monkey and talking like a monkey".
Opinions are divided about the merits of Steve Bell's work. Like most cartoonists he uses running gags, and therefore seems funnier to regular than to occasional readers. But even among Guardian aficionados, there is an ongoing Bell vs Garry Trudeau (and therefore If... vs Doonesbury) debate, occasionally spilling onto the paper's Letters page, which exists mainly because the two comic strips were, for many years, carried by the Guardian next to each other. The debate is as much about taste as anything else, prompted for example by Bell's typical juxtaposition of toilet humour with high art. He is fond of parodying famous paintings. Examples include his parody of Goya's The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters (in an editorial cartoon about the UK Independence Party); William Hogarth's The Gates of Calais about the ban on UK meat exports following outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease and bovine BSE; and - before the 2005 General Election when it briefly seemed as if the Liberal Democrats might seriously threaten Labour - J.M.W. Turner's The Fighting Temeraire), in which a chirpy Charles Kennedy as tug-boat towed a grotesque and dilapidated Tony Blair to be broken up. Bell is also fond of using the pejorative British word "wanker" and its euphemistic variants in his If... comic strip.
