Its strange when you’ve had a cast iron routine for the last forty tears or so, and then suddenly it’s removed. Takes a while to adjust. Since this blog has been more or less in suspended animation since this site was constructed,
I felt the time might be ripe to bring it to life. Apologies for all the zombie references.
I have long believed in the importance of reportage in cartooning. There is always a story, to be found and told, and some of us do it with pictures. In my case made by hand, but always, I hope, to the point. You work out the way of telling as you draw, and in a daily strip you build characters in real time. Margaret Thatcher was my first real challenge and I started trying to draw her long before the IF… strip began in 1981. My first attempt was in a magazine called Broadside in Birmingham in 1978. Broadside was a kind of Whats On with added lefty politics (or should that be the other way around?), and I had been peddling my talents as a cartoonist there since we arrived in Birmingham in the mid-seventies. I was an art teacher desperate to get out of teaching, and hankering to be a cartoonist, to the extent of throwing in my job as number two in the Colouring In department at Aston Manor school, just downwind of the Ansells brewery and the HP sauce works, and signing on for the six months unemployment benefit, to which I was entitled after my years hard graft at Aston Manor. I distilled the experience of my year as a teacher into a four-page strip in Committed Comics commissioned by Hunt Emerson at the Arts Lab Press in Brum and called The Legend of Bigfoot. Meanwhile I was working on an idea for a childrens book about a train that could travel through time. Bigfoot was published, and I was paid thirty pounds, but the time-travelling train ran out of steam and ground to a halt. I seemed to thrive on the shorter formats which was the way my career headed.
My first strip for Broadside was called Maxwell the Mutant and was about an ordinary Midlands bloke who mutated every time he drank a pint of mild. He mutated into a punk rocker, a Rasta and, in the Silver Jubilee year of 1977, into Her Majesty the Queen, which really impressed Maxwells nemesis, the Leader of Birmingham City Council, Neville Worthyboss.
It was modestly successful, in the sense that they kept publishing it, but I never earnt a penny from it, so I decided to get my teeth into Margaret Thatcher, who by 1979 was about to become Britains first female Prime Minister, and the format I chose was a spoof of Crossroads, a popular TV soap opera with terrible acting and cardboard sets, made and set deep in the Midlands.
The strip was every bit as bad as the original soap, but with none of its redeeming qualities of artlessness and wobbly scenery. The caricatures were fairly dismal as well, though my Geoffrey Howe showed promise. My Thatcher caricature took much longer to gestate however.
By now, after a great deal of legwork, I had managed to secure some paid cartoon work, firstly writing and drawing regular comic pages for an IPC childrens comic called Whoopee about a bionic boy who, in the manner of Steve Austin the Billion Dollar Man, had been rebuilt, but badly, as Dick Doobie the Back to Front Man. I also wrote a letter to Social Work Today, the only locally, Birmingham-based magazine I could find, offering my services. I seem to remember using the phrase you wouldnt believe how cheap good cartoons and illustrations can be! It worked and, as my wife Heather was by now a fully qualified social worker, I knew everything I needed to know about the profession. It was mainly illustration work, but I hankered to do comics for a more grown-up audience. There was Gilbert Gauche Joins the Movement and The Adventures of Lord God Almighty which ran in the Leveller, The Vicar- Man with a Language Problem in Duck Soup and Bella the Lucky Housewife Goes on Holiday for the Arts Lab Press again, but none of it paid anything.
My first real lucky break was in June 1979, at the dawn of the Thatcher era, when Time Out, which in those far-off days had a hefty lefty news section edited by Duncan Campbell, who asked me to do a strip, which turned into an allegory of a farm of put-upon animals run by Thatcher and her team, and rapidly became known as Maggies Farm. My caricature of her was still not even embryonic, just laborious versions of photographs of an extremely irritating blonde woman but, to be scrupulously fair, Thatchers own image was itself still in preparation.
There was definitely something around the eyes, but I could not make out what exactly. Her voice was delib-er-ate-ly slo-wing and lowering. Her hair was darkening and becoming more rigid. I made a sketch that was not for publication, but it summed her up neatly.
For her first conference as Prime Minister, at Blackpool in 1979 I pulled out all the stops. I did not go there but made it all up back home in Birmingham. From subsequent experience it turned out to be quite an accurate rendering, though when I actually went to it in Brighton the following year, it was still a deeply disturbing occasion. I witnessed the Ladys Not For Turning speech and distilled it into I Walked with The Zombies.
Within a year we had escaped both Birmingham and social work and moved to Brighton ourselves, though not necessarily to be closer to the Tories. Penguin were doing a book of Maggies Farms, the Clash asked me to illustrate some of their lyrics on a printed insert in their new album Sandinista, and Heather had just given birth to our first child, William. Then I got a call from the Guardian. It seemed that they were looking for someone to do a daily strip. They took me on to do a months trial, four weeks of six strips, and over that summer, as we prepared to move south, after much trial and error, I came up with the idea for the IF strip. It started with Kiplings famous poem of the same name (Thatcher allegedly kept a volume by her bedside) but instead of Kiplings deathless imperialist couplets (If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds worth of distance run The earth is yours, and everything thats in it And, which is more, youll be a man, my son.) I substituted IF God was a Social Democrat and IF Stockbrokers were made of rubber and so on.
As it turned out, none of the months trial ever got published. They were a kind of insurance policy that was never needed, but the strip got under way in November 1981.
It actually found its feet six months later, during the Falklands war, and the IF strip never looked back. I found my way through the rigours of doing something for the paper every day (except Sundays) though actually it was dispatched in weekly batches, via British Rails Red Star service every Thursday morning (for publication the following Monday).
I found my way around the libel laws and pushed the boundaries of taste and decency, while managing to establish that subediting a cartoon strip is not the same as normal subediting, as it actually involves forging the authors handwriting. This was after an egregious episode when the wording of a strip was changed without consulting me, and the whole intended meaning of the strip was upended. (It was actually about former Foreign Secretary Dr David Owen of the SDP and the Editor complained that I had traduced his views, which was a bit thick, bearing in mind that they had totally traduced my strip without telling me. Peter Preston, the Editor subsequently wrote to say that I did actually have a point, and that henceforth any changes to the wording would be agreed, as long as it was humanly possible. This set a very important precedent that lasted almost, but not quite, up to the present.
The simple fact was that, to do the insane amounts of work that I produced for the paper (six, then eight, then ten cartoons a week for a while) was only possible if they trusted me to get on with it, and I trusted them to back me up when necessary. And so, it continued for pretty well all the forty-two years that I continued to work for them.
Copyright©SteveBell2024-AllRightsReserved
IF Stands Up, is the twentieth and almost certainly the final compilation of a series of strips that began with The IF Chronicles back in 1983, and the book is so called for the simple reason that it does stand up, as a real-time record (albeit occasionally insane) of a particular period in British and in World politics. I would not have got away with it in any other medium than the comic strip, and in no other paper than the Guardian, as it used to be.