This paper’s legendary cartoonist Abu Abraham used to sign his work as Abraham till 1956. That was when he joined The Observer, London’s biggest Sunday newspaper. Editor David Astor had a worry. He wondered if “Abraham”, a telltale Jewish name, would create “a false slant”. Then, as now, relations between Israel and the Arab world were tense, all of which could wade into cartoons. To make sure readers saw the cartoon as political and not remotely faith-led, how about a pen name?
The cartoonist picked what his school friends called him — “Abu” — and scribbled the ultra-short signature like a visual flourish. A great cartooning career began slant-proofed. An equally illustrious one just ended on a perceived slant. The Guardian sacked its longtime staff cartoonist Steve Bell for his drawing of Benjamin Netanyahu. The cartoon shows the Israeli leader as a surgeon in boxing gloves, readying for an abdominal incision on himself at a surgery site called Gaza.
The editors were quick to decide that the image was a direct reference to the “pound of flesh” demanded by Jewish moneylender Shylock in Merchant of Venice and, therefore, antisemitic and offensive. Bell said nothing Shakespearean crossed his mind. He had been alluding to a classic 1960s cartoon by David Levine on US President Lyndon Johnson. The star illustrator of The New York Review of Books, Levine was a master who brought context to caricature. He wouldn’t stop at getting the resemblance and exaggerating the face and the form; he would improvise to suit the occasion. President Johnson, having recovered from a gallbladder surgery, had shown the surgical scar to reporters. Levine worked on this well-publicised event, changing the scar to the map of Vietnam.
Back then, in the 1960s and ’70s, cartoonists everywhere followed the Vietnam War from the same side. They found no merit in the napalm bomb. Cartoon art shines in times of such one-sided clarity as it did during World War II when greats like Britain’s David Low and America’s Herblock led their reluctant appeasing nations into an unequivocal fight against Nazis and fascists. Cartoonists saw through Hitler and Mussolini sooner than the pundits who made policy.
Cartoon historians say that it is through the inter-war years and the Great Depression in between that display cartooning got honed into a fine editorial art. While the war kept the leaders in the limelight, cartoonists never lost sight of the breadlines that followed the Wall Street collapse. Breadwinners mattered as much as winners and losers. Soon after the war, the global cartooning capital shifted from London to multiple American cities and American cartoonists became increasingly wary of their own elected governments. Herblock coined the word “McCarthyism” in his 1950 cartoon in The Washington Post.
At his lethal best in the Watergate era, he always drew President Nixon with a five o’ clock shadow and once went so far as to show the President crawl out of a sewer. The wily politician knew readers trusted the cartoonist more than the President and admitted he had to rid himself of the “Herblock image”. Younger practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic took on successive governments that kept tweaking external threats to manipulate domestic politics. Cartoons were constantly voicing the thought that elected governments weren’t much better than autocracies when it came to what they did between elections.
This was how adversarial the work practice had gotten when Steve Bell joined the profession in late 1970s. He sharpened the wicked pencil even more as rookies are wont to. Visceral rather than cerebral, he distilled the image till it was grotesque enough to meet the acidity level he sought to achieve. He also employed recurring devices, what David Low called a tab of identity, to serially provoke. The recipient of this favoured treatment was John Major, Britain’s Conservative PM in the late 1990s. Major was always drawn as a sad Superman wearing spotted underpants over a grey suit.
Like the best of cartoonists, Bell came into his own in war — US President George Bush’s war on Iraq. Packaged as a global campaign against terror, this conflict wasn’t as easy to cartoon as the World War or the one in Vietnam. How can you criticise an organised war on sly schemers who blew up people and places? Cartoonists ignored the propaganda and focussed on the collateral damage to democracy. Practitioners like Mike Luckovich showed they could nuance as well as they exaggerated — enough to differentiate between terror and religion. Cartoons called out every sign of Islamophobia.
Bell himself was at his merciless best. He launched a double-barrelled assault on President Bush and his own Prime Minister Tony Blair. It seemed he was swimming across the Atlantic every cartooning day to chronicle this war-mongering duo. The twin targets remind you of the wartime comic character David Low created, mashing Mussolini and Hitler into “Muzzler”.
Bell was a diligent practitioner. He would attend party conventions and sketch at breakneck speed, perfect the caricatures of emerging leaders, sustain a difficult style rich in detail and distortion and submit the day’s art work for editorial clearance, cursing early deadlines all along.
He has been no more of an offender than the best in the business. Cartoonists worth their name, David Low to Abu Abraham, have been accused of causing offence. Editors take it in their stride and publishers keep running cartoons. Strangely, it is always the single cartoon like Bell’s one on Netanyahu that is pulled out to cite offence. In a newspaper art meant to be serially followed through days, weeks and years, what could be so decisive about an individual artwork?
Bell’s body of work spanning 40 years is very much part of The Guardian’s legacy. The newspaper was as much a beneficiary as the cartoonist. Bell drew blood for sure but then that was part of a robust editorial tradition. India owes its cartooning and cricket to colonial Britain. Post-colonial British press has sent out a sad message: Veteran Bell is only as good as his last cartoon. Was Don Bradman only as good as his last innings?
ep.unny@expressindia.com
