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Staff cartoonist with the Times Literary Supplement. Lives in London
I was thinking of how the coronavirus has reshaped and reconfigured so many different aspects of our lives. And I wanted the cartoon to be a bit positive. The virus has made a hole in the fabric of our world, but things are starting to come back. People are going to fly a bit less and hopefully care about the environment a bit more.
I was ill with Covid-19 in March and April for about three weeks (I’m better now). I had a deadline to meet while in isolation and I’d wake up, draw and go back to sleep again. I stayed in my little room for 15 days. In that time, it was really beautiful to have work to do, otherwise I’d have been bouncing off the walls. I was most happy when I was drawing.
In the beginning of the pandemic, I was feeling fairly useless: why wasn’t I doing something useful like working as a nurse? But my drawings about Covid-19 have got the most response I’ve ever had and that has felt really good. Some of the work has been resonating with people, helping them to reconfigure and understand their experiences. It turns out that actually we do have a function.
Favourite cartoonist of all time?
Gerald Scarfe, because of the energy and scratchiness, things I sometimes feel are lacking from my work. I just think he’s amazing.
Topic or subject matter that inspires you most?
Making people look at ordinary, innocuous things in a new way.
Has been drawing for Private Eye since 1979, also the Spectator, the Oldie and the Church Times. Lives in Dorset
I was thinking about the R rate and playing around with words and this took shape. Ideas for cartoons often come to me through wordplay. I read English at university, whereas drawing was just a hobby, but it was the drawing that took off.
There’s a lot of outlet at the moment for black humour, though the editor of Private Eye started appealing for cartoons that were nothing to do with the pandemic because it was all that was on anyone’s mind. With coronavirus, I try to keep it reasonably light-hearted – things that I hope will make people smile, rather than groan in dismay.
I’m not an avid devourer of news, particularly at the moment because it’s all been so depressing, though obviously I do keep up with it – I’ve been saying “Arrgh” to myself quite a lot recently.
Favourite cartoonist of all time?
Ronald Searle. I love his characters, the expressions he captures. He did a series called Revolting Cats, and there was one he did of a particularly revolting cat startled by a gesture of affection and I loved the frozen expression and attitude of the cat, it was just wonderful.
Topic or subject matter that inspires you most?
Like most Private Eye cartoonists, it has to be politics and politicians saying silly things – that’s an endless source of cartoons.
Political cartoonist for the Observer. Lives in Norfolk
Britannia and the lion are two characters I’ve been using quite a bit during the past few months, to express a national mood. That’s a little Huawei phone lying on the ground, dropped as if it’s a hot potato. I was just thinking, of all the times to be caught between the two great economic blocs in the world, the US and China, we are in the process of leaving the third. It beggars belief.
The only good thing you can say about 2020, for people who draw political cartoons for a living, is that it’s been a really productive year so far. We’re never without a contentious topic. Often what one is doing is polemical or satirical, but there’s also a fellow feeling, and during the pandemic I’ve been drawn to more empathic images – people in lockdown looking out of tower block windows, or figures coming together in unity. I’ve been trying to do something that says, “We all feel this, don’t we?” as opposed to, “Look at that person, aren’t they terrible.” In the current political climate, there’s an enormous range, from the quiet heroism of NHS workers to government advisers who decide to test their eyesight, that one can use as subject matter.
Favourite cartoonist of all time?
Daumier, the French cartoonist of the mid-19th century. His drawing style is so amazing and he was a master caricaturist. He was also working at an incredibly interesting, febrile time, through all sorts of political censorship, riots and absolutism, and republicanism bubbling up, yet he did work with wonderful, graceful style.
Topic or subject matter that inspires you most?
Brexit. Isn’t that an odd thing to say? And yet, it makes me cross all the time and then I can draw feeling cross about it. I wish we could rewind the clock, but in the absence of that, it’s incumbent on us to say continually there’s a better way.
Private Eye, New Statesman, Spectator, Prospect. Lives in Hove
I have a cartoon notebook and I just fill it with loads of doodles and ideas – I draw them rather than write them down. Then I go through them all at the end of the day, making slight changes, and if I think something might work as a joke, like this one, I draw it up.
Work has been very busy of late and there’s a constant supply of subject matter. What I’ve found is that, at the end of the day, I just cannot read or watch any more news. In the past I would cook with the news on, but now I’ve just been watching Location, Location, Location.
It’s a bit like Brexit where at first there was a nonstop supply of jokes and creativity. The financial crash, too, was hugely profitable for cartoonists, though I say that in inverted commas, because nothing cartoonists do is profitable. But there was a constant stream of jokes, and you didn’t have to hunt around on a slow-news day. It’s the same with the pandemic: everyone knows what you’re talking about because everyone knows the subject matter. And it just has so many different angles.
Favourite cartoonist of all time?
David Sipress, an American cartoonist who does stuff for the New Yorker, is close to a genius. I really like his cartoon style – it looks like he can’t draw. He captures life as a poor, forsaken human being.
Topic or subject matter that inspires you most?
The effect on the forlorn, everyday person of events beyond their control.
The cartoons of Jon Link and Mick Bunnage have featured in the Guardian, New Scientist, Esquire and elsewhere. Link lives in Brighton, Bunnage in London
This is the longest time the pubs have been shut in living history. With this cartoon we wanted to reaffirm the UK people’s right to responsibly watch a pub fight while eating a packet of crisps, whatever else might be going on in the real world.
Since we started working together, we’ve always worked on the phone, just in case something like the lockdown happened, so in many ways we were fully prepped when it did. As cartoonists, we just deal with whatever’s put in front of us, so if the next thing is a nuclear war or something, as long as we can gaffer-tape a pencil on to an arm stump we’ll have a go at getting some jokes out of it.
We see making cartoons as being like watching a load of stuff go by on a conveyor belt, then trying to remember what you’ve seen. You have to draw selected chunks of it as it happens or you forget. People find it reassuring that there’s someone out there sieving through the bin bags on their behalf, then crafting it into something they might want to laugh at, depending on whether or not they think it’s funny.
During lockdown, Jon’s been building benches out of pallets he found in the street and Mick hasn’t been out of his house for four months. Neither of which has had much impact on our work.
Favourite cartoonist of all time?
Steinberg, Mordillo, Heath, Nick Newman, Viz, Kevin Woodcock, Thurber.
Topic or subject matter that inspires you most?
We tried to boil down the essence of a good cartoon once and discovered the perfect set-up is an authority figure sat behind a desk being told to fuck off by a man wearing a hat.
Has published cartoons in Private Eye since 1990. Lives in London
When this whole thing ends, we’re going to find that people have had very different experiences of 2020, so it makes it difficult to say anything about it. For a lot of people it’s been a sort of non-year, for others it’s been very traumatic. But most people can agree that it’s been a big pile of poo. This joke sums it up quite quickly, whereas really it’s very, very complicated. Most of us don’t really understand what’s happening; even the experts don’t really know.
Obviously you don’t want to be glib – people have lost family members – but at the same time, a lot of it is slightly ludicrous, with very strange mixed messages coming out. People are being encouraged to get back on aeroplanes, but now you’ve got to go into quarantine, you dirty scum.
We were all raised to think the apocalypse was going to be more dramatic than this. Is this the end of humanity then? It does just seem like it’s the end of decent things on telly. If this were a box set, I’d have moved on to the next one by now.
Favourite cartoonist of all time?
I like Albert Uderzo, who drew the Asterix books. He was the first proper cartoonist I liked, and if you look at my cartoons, you’ll see his influence in the big noses.
Topic or subject matter that inspires you most?
I studied politics and economics at university, so a lot of my cartoons are inspired by the fact that people I was at university with are now in positions of authority. Some American humourist said the true definition of hell is to wake up to find your high-school class running the country. That’s the position I’m at now in my middle age.
Regularly published by the Guardian, New Statesman and the BBC. Lives in London
I always worry when making art about a hugely important issue like Black Lives Matter that I’m not going to do it justice. It’s such a massive movement, manifesting in so many ways globally. The American movement strikes a particular chord with me. I’m originally from St Louis, Missouri, where Black Lives Matter started. The racism within policing there was obvious for anyone to see, and that racism was reflected in St Louis at large. On top of racism, the authority given to police and normalised by society in America is a big problem.
There are some wonderful American political cartoonists, but if I had to choose, my preference lies with British political cartoons, which I think are, collectively, wittier and a bit more distinct from one another than are their American counterparts.
I’m not sure how I come up with ideas. I follow the news like the horrifying soap opera it is, and see where that takes me. I’ll be wandering the flat having imagined conversations in my head and think, huh, that bit was sort of funny. I basically tell myself jokes constantly. That’s the whole process.
Favourite political cartoonist of all time?
Ralph Steadman. Everything he does is beautiful and also sick and weird.
Topic or subject matter that inspires you most?
Anything that feels like it actually matters, rather than something that is just theatre.
Has drawn for Radio Times, Private Eye, the Observer and the Sunday Times. Lives in Somerset
I’ve used that fish-in-a-bowl theme quite a bit in the past. It’s a go-to starting point if I’m scratching my head, and it kind of works with the lockdown – it’s quite a good image for how I and most freelancers work, we’re in our own little bubble. The fish is me, and probably a lot of people, though we’ve all had completely different experiences of the pandemic. People say we’re all in the same boat, but we’re not really. We’re all in the same storm and some people have nice boats and some people are clinging to little rafts. But there is a collective consciousness in that everyone’s plugged into this terrible event. Which is what cartoonists do: we observe and we plug into this consciousness and then we take our own angle on it and hopefully cheer people up. That’s the aim.
Favourite cartoonist of all time?
I couldn’t say. There are so many people who are good, it’s actually quite depressing. You see young people coming up, and people who have been around for a while still doing amazing things, and you just think, oh dear, it’s quite intimidating actually.
Topic or subject matter that inspires you most?
What’s really strange is, sometimes the blandest things that you’re asked to tackle, like accountancy, can become the most interesting and yield really creative ideas. Though I do like politics: it’s nice if you can land a shot on somebody who you particularly dislike, or who’s done something that you disagree with.
Has drawn for Private Eye, the Guardian and the Times. Lives in London
I know people who are going bonkers because they’re working on their own at home. They’ve been sat watching daytime television and drinking too much, and not really using the lockdown fruitfully or wisely. I’ve always been used to working from home – I think most freelancers are, and certainly most cartoonists, so they’ve probably not noticed any difference, other than that the pubs have been shut.
Bad times are generally good for cartoonists, because more people tend to buy newsprint when things are bad, but this is different because papers are suffering due to lack of advertising, so they cut back, and the first people they cut back on are cartoonists.
Favourite cartoonist of all time?
Sempé, the French cartoonist. His cartoons are purely visual and beautifully drawn, and they’re great ideas. He’s a social cartoonist, and the social cartoon really has been obliterated, which is a shame. They’re wonderful things.
Topic or subject matter that inspires you most?
Anything that annoys me. At the moment, it’s the restrictions in restaurants and pubs. It’s not fun going to a pub any more because of them. And people having a nervous breakdown because you’ve come within six feet of them. Social distancing is really getting up my nose at the moment.
Has drawn for Private Eye and the Literary Review. Lives in Devon
This cartoon is really different from my usual stuff. I don’t do observational or current affairs or satirical cartoons or anything like that. My cartoons are almost exclusively bits of wordplay or surreal puns. My process is normally just: things pop into my head. I wait for the ideas to come to me. It’s a passive system. So the events of 2020 aren’t really affecting my work that much. I did one cartoon in the early days of the lockdown where a murmuration was just one bird on its own, in social isolation, but that’s quite unusual. Mostly I’m in my own little world and that’s where my ideas come from.
This cartoon is slightly disingenuous because that’s not really my life. I’m not a full-time cartoonist – I do various other things including book illustration. But I do work from home and I am quite used to the routines of a lockdown life. Sitting there staring out of the window looking for inspiration is what I do quite a lot of the time.
Favourite cartoonist of all time?
Gary Larson. He’s someone whose work I grew up with – my dad and I loved looking at his books together – so he has a sentimental place in my heart. He’s not necessarily always the best, but he’s very funny.
Topic or subject matter that inspires you most?
My cartoons quite often feature animals – there are a lot of ducks. It’s the Larson thing of using animals as a way of looking at the traits of humans.
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