Abstract
In the winter of 2019, in the depths of that year’s general election, I had a problem. It wasn’t the campaign itself, its interminable length, fatuous conduct or likely outcome – after 35 years as a political cartoonist, I’ve grown inured to that kind of crap. Instead, it was the fact that I wasn’t at all happy about the way I drew Matt Hancock. Back then, of course, this didn’t matter that much, though it mattered enough to bug me. Cartoonists tend to have a repertory company of characters at the top of government that need to be instantly recognisable, and with his nerdy yet shifty Tiggerishness, Hancock was shaping up nicely to be given the full caricatural going over.
And yet I knew I hadn’t yet “got him”. It’s a weird yet palpable thing, what I term knowing you have your hand up their soul so that, as the great cartoonist Low put it, the cartoon looks more like its victim than they do. You know instinctively when you’ve achieved it, and in Hancock’s case I hadn’t. Worse, try as I might, it seemed I couldn’t.
Above: Colm Campbell, aka Nuff, winner, #DrawMattHancock. Left: David Waywell, winner, #DrawPiersMorgan
Which is why, on December 9, 2019, I took to Twitter to launch the #DrawMattHancock Challenge, giving my 26,000 followers (hem hem – I think they like the pictures, the rants and the creative swearing) a week in which to capture the health secretary in any medium, ostensibly because he looked like the only leading Tory who might actually mind (I think it is forgivable that I failed to gauge the true depths of his shamelessness back then). Thus we would hand him down to posterity.
Hound him down, more like. I got more than 60 entries of finished artwork, many of which could never be published except in the nihilistic midden of social media. I decided we also needed a winner, pour encourager les autres, which I judged to be the entry from @nuffinc, the handle of Northern Irish cartoonist and illustrator Colm Campbell. His piece of work, previous page, is simply sublime, genuinely meeting all Low’s criteria, but also jemmying open to our disgusted gaze whatever it is Hancock has inside instead of a soul.
I sent Colm a copy of my latest book (lucky him) and started fielding demands for the next #Draw…challenge. Twenty months later, as I write, I’m about to launch the 37th challenge and with no sign yet that the ravenous and eternal appetite to knock out horrible scribbles of our masters has been sated. Better yet, from this random, online community of total
Left to right: Mike Stokoe, winner, #DrawMichaelGove, Davey Jones, runner up, #DrawMichaelGove
strangers I’ve been invited into realms of mesmerising weirdness. There’s The Radical Embroiderer, who sews her caricatures; the eight-year-old girl in Glasgow who won the #DrawABetterFuture Challenge; the seriously famous textile designer who’s won several times, including with her entry to #DrawTrump, an orange cheese sculpture she filmed melting under the grill; and the Swiss scientist who tweets the same obscene typographical conceit, making it funnier every time.
We’ve also had entries from professional cartoonists (Viz’s Davey Jones’ Arcimboldo-inspired sliced meat Michael Gove was beaten by a head by Private Eye’s Mike Stokoe’s portrait of Gove as Mike’s own naked torso with Photoshopped nose and glasses, and nipples as eyes – the true stuff of nightmares). However, the challenge has also lured out brilliant, but largely unpublished, cartoonists such as Kevin Wells, Joe Lawrence, David Waywell and Lou McKeever. When I say largely unpublished, I mean in what people who don’t get paid by it call the “mainstream media”. While, instinctively, I back flakey yet palpable old newspapers against online ethereality, in this regard I begin to have doubts.
When we speak loftily of press freedom, we forget that every newspaper closed down in the last 80 years has been suppressed by its own proprietor. And every British cartoonist silenced or losing their livelihood has been a victim of newspaper editors or managers.
Indeed, the previous management of the Daily Express contrived to sack Paul Thomas on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo massacres in January 2015. Happily, after a period of genuine hardship, Paul’s now found a berth at the Daily Mail.
I’ve been joking for years that if newspapers eventually die, like any sensible parasite we cartoonists will simply jump on the next passing host.
But it’s the slowest of slow deaths, with some of the lifesaving surgery appearing worse than the disease. Five of the UK’s nine national dailies don’t carry daily political cartoons; few publish sport, pocket or finance cartoons any more. The Sun seems to run no cartoons at all.
And yet there’s a wealth of cartooning talent constantly emerging, as the #Draw…challenges have shown, bringing joy and succour to artist and countless thousands of readers (viewers?) throughout 18 months of lockdown misery. The only downside is it’s all online and it’s all free, compounded by the tragedy of newspapers being so dumb that they’re missing an easy trick.
Left to right: Ciara Loughery (8 yrs), winner, #DrawABetterFuture, Kevin Wells aka Squiggle King, winner #DrawDesmondSwayne
