itt: cartoons abt uk politics that are bad cartoons

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/be476d2728f682570af639492ab3b385818c0389/18_186_2470_1482/master/2470.jpg?w=965&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=e02549e244d999afe85d454ed45bfa40

I have a theory that the Daily Telegraph catoonist "BLOWER" is in fact BRANCO (see the bad US politics cartoons thread) doubling up on his income by working under a pseudonym

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2017/05/30/cartoon-30052017-large_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqgCXocDQF5kP7s3jSjli3eCH0-jRUT4rHK8EgtaGoQwQ.gif

is drawing a tortoise really that hard

I'm trying to parse that first cartoon, but no, it's not happening. I assume that it suggests that whatever Brexit happens it's bad for business, but suspect I've got that all wrong.

grudging respect for the shamelessness of not bothering to work out a way to complete his Abbott and Costello pun and just drawing a big picture of Corbyn covering up the rest of the name

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2017/05/09/blower170507-large_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqeo_i_u9APj8RuoebjoAHt0k9u7HhRJvuo-ZLenGRumA.jpg

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello? More like DUD ABBOTT and LOSER CO(rbyn)STELLO, right? *submits cartoon to Daily Telgraph, slopes off to spend rest of the day in pub*

haha yes i have a full-size version of the first cartoon open in my tabs, i keep going back to see if the penny's dropped, but no, it is more mysterious than ever

most of his other cartoons are just ugly clumsy and obvious -- he's been getting work for years! -- but there's a sort of wtf poetry to this one

wot no Mac?

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/06/08/01/41350AB800000578-0-image-a-34_1496880366602.jpg

90% sure he has just recaptioned an old cartoon there

ok not to be caot defend-a-mac, but that is a serviceable and well drawn* cartoon making a political point i disagree with

*obviously he's always been a giles knock-off so i hate him for that reason**
**my mum drew my attention to how well mac draws curly telephone flexes, which is an odd thing to notice, but once you do, she was right, he was good at it, and perhaps still could be were there a need

How to tell if you've drawn a really good cartoon:

http://i.imgur.com/GkhuTA9.png

Blower is esp. terrible.

it's weird, i know people irl whose mental landscape re: politics is accurately illustrated by these guys

and the arguments are near identical to the stuff Tressell mocks in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, lickspittles are tenacious

a year old now yet suddenly relevant AND badly drawn
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DCC-IwAW0AAGPcj.jpg:large

Brookes also drew this oddly terrifying Boris/Gove cartoon:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmQw0nlUsAAOmra.jpg

Boris bearing uncanny resemblance to Rod Liddle in top panel.

Not enough Martin Rowson on this thread.

posting cartoons from low circulation trot newspapers feels a little like breaking a butterfly on a wheel, but I was impressed by the number of captions on this one

http://i.imgur.com/BjRupxd.png

gerald scarfe is bad not good:
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/media/images/81420000/jpg/_81420916_geraldscarfe.jpg

britain's last-ditch stunt: the davis-yeltsin switcheroo

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DCoaEnuXcAAcbe1.jpg:large

i think that's victor garber at the eu end of the table

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNTQxODYxNzE3NV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwOTM4MTMwMg@@._V1_UY317_CR20,0,214,317_AL_.jpg

posting cartoons from low circulation trot newspapers feels a little like breaking a butterfly on a wheel, but I was impressed by the number of captions on this one

http://i.imgur.com/BjRupxd.png

― soref, Saturday, June 17, 2017 4:09 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

some fine art brut here

polly toyn

i like how the cartoonist just went ahead and wrote "shit" on the pile of things he hated

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/methode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2Fa09e347c-dcf5-11e6-b8ce-5a639b2dfcaa.jpg?crop=3460%2C1946%2C263%2C147&resize=685

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DDAKNPxWsAAEKGR.jpg:large

bit sad abt nosferatu, he did bad things but he doesn't deserve this

bad cartoon about Europe from 1989

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/2f/6d/49/2f6d49ea9ea51c4bd0ab05b1b7fbea2d.jpg

Hallmark of bad cartoons = everything has to be labelled. I know this has been said before, but they keep doing it. Are there editors out there encouraging this?

Also, am yet to see a successful rendition of Michael Gove. He is somehow beyond caricature,

did you not see the cartoon above portraying him as a fish eating Boris Jonson's head or

brookes is just drawing pob

drawing him as pob is ok because he does look quite like pob, but it's not enough because he is also much more repulsive than pob. I can see them going for a cross between pob and a human, whereas the real thing looks like a cross between pob and a body from the haunted swamp.

This is surely the canonical Gove?
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oHfzDFoVDvk/UEYRaaaY5EI/AAAAAAAAF9M/afSgSxxnk_0/s1600/Stephen-Collins-17-March--001.jpg

Basically Pob crossed with Mr Bean.

Steve Bell belongs on here, though some will I'm sure defend him on the grounds of perserverence: "They don't get it... It's funny because it's not really a monkey, it's really George W Bush... Oh well, maybe next time."

Hallmark of bad cartoons = everything has to be labelled

It's more that ppl like Cummings were steeped in the history of political cartooning, where labelling was as much a part of the style as thought balloons were in comic books. And as with thought balloons, labelling in political cartoons nowadays is very hard to pull off - it's become an 'ironic' device that yes, signals 'bad' cartooning.

Not to defend Cummings, whose work always lacked Mac's visually pleasing cartooning skills - though I guess the dour ugliness of Cummings' drawing style is editorially appropriate for the Express.

I do think Cummings deserves some credit for the look of "never in all my days" indignation on the Sovereignty Dolphin

Thatcher in a swimsuit is really disturbing me

cummings has a style, i always liked the thickness of his line (not well shown off in this example)

i will defend bell: he has a highly original symbolist imagination, which i think is a hard thing to retain after decades of turning out cartoons to order several times a week

(if he has flaws they are rarely the flaws of reach-down banality: i wd honestly rather an artist is drifting the outer reaches of his/her unconscious for insight and intuitive connection than hunkering down in the ante-room of cliche) (true he's sometimes very bad on the power dynamics of sex stuff: there be dragons in the outer reaches of yr unconscious)

i always enjoyed the pleasure cummings took in drawing brezhnev

I always stand by Steve Bell as an uncompromising angry leftist in a world of scumbags.

I also think that his bigger images often show him painting really well and evocatively. He has a good appreciation of art history and artistic method. And he is also a lucid and intelligent writer, better than many other people who write for the Guardian but can't draw.

he was rubbish on university challenge (alumni edition) though.

still have fond memories of the complete set of the collected 'If...' as a kid, 7 or 8 volumes, probably long term borrowed from my older brother or parents.

... there was a quotidian, almost cosy quality to its anarchic silliness, not unlike the young ones.

man at bar: lager lager lager lager lager lager lager 'n' a babycham
penguin: congratulations on your brilliant impression of a bus breaking down!

^ quality original material

Steve Bell is not bad as an artist, surely. I mean he has his own very distinctive style which works well.
He does keep doing things like this though

https://edinburgheye.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/stevebell_incest.jpg

I like If and Maggie's Farm

Steve Bell's debt to Robert Crumb + American underground comix seems more or less unique for a UK editorial cartoonist?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DEIO1g0XYAAJfvk.jpg

terrible + disablist cartoon in Osborne's Evening Standard shocker.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DGOEdB6W0AAHrQr.jpg:large

quite like adams' angular style, this isn't a bad cartoon in the sense the o/p is a bad cartoon

obviously his politics are as bad as his grasp of what's going on in venezuela or indeed the labour party

"saffron swire" ?????? cmon now the AI needs to try a little harder than this surely

Saffron Augusta Petrushka Swire, please.

https://bsky.app/profile/zarahsultana.bsky.social/post/3luglijezkc2u

Posts That Witness Madness (Tom D.) at 7:33 21 Jul 25

(xps) Who is the guy in the water?

(xp) John Nott's granddaughter!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln3SpXXYTHY

Hopefully she'll be gone tomorrow then

guy in the water is supposed to be Environment Secretary Steve Reed I think, and it works insofar as he's a nondescript grey-haired middle aged bloke in a blue suit

to be clear: the cartoon as a whole is an abomination

I do feel a little sorry for Saffron in that the nu-Observer doesn't seem to have ever tweeted out a cartoon before, which makes me suspect that they chose to tweet this one with the caption 'cartoon of the week' and the artist's name because they anticipated that UK twitter leftists would make it go viral. Anyway, the tweet has now been deleted and the cartoon appears to have been unpublished from the Observer website?

it is funny how literally every member of her family appears to have their own wikipedia page. Her uncle composed the music for all the Wallace and Gromit films.

she's also distantly related to the lead singer from Pendulum/Knife Party

And a descendant of a notorious drug smuggler.

Sorry 19th century import export business engaged in the China trade that lead to two opium wars.

And a descendant of a notorious drug smuggler.

Sorry 19th century import export business engaged in the China trade that lead to two opium wars.

what's kind of funny is that Swire has kind of done her homework a little bit: the art is not a million miles away from the initations the whatsapp Corbyn canvassers group puts out:

https://i.ibb.co/5hX3MKSc/Whats-App-Image-2025-07-14-at-13-38-34-580020e0.jpg

If it wasn't for the racism and crude anti-communism she might have got points for that

At first glance Crombwell's hand there looks like it's mutated into a scythe

A sickle you mean.

Pizza is one of the favorite foods of the young people in Asmara.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Eritrean_cuisine

https://i.imgur.com/JVq246r.jpeg

he's still got it!

tbf Matt is like a master of the renaissance standard cartoonist compared to most of the dreadful shit posted here recently

important to remember that these are the crème of the crop and that there are thousands of unpublished Matt cartoons sitting in an archive somewhere that didn't make the grade:

He arrives in the office at nine o’clock, then spends the morning studying the newspapers and trying out various ideas. By mid-afternoon, he has produced about six cartoons, which he touts around colleagues, like a comedian road-testing jokes, before taking them to the night editor, who helps him whittle the six down to three. It is the editor of the paper — lucky, lucky man — who gets to make the final selection.

“The Matt cartoon is the highlight of the day for people up and down Britain,” says William Lewis, editor-in-chief of the Telegraph. “But I am in the privileged position of getting to see it in the afternoon, before publication. And, what’s more, Matt gives me at least three of his gems to choose from every day. As you can imagine, it’s a tough task plumping for one over the other two — but it’s easily the most enjoyable part of being editor of The Daily Telegraph.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20100719171305/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/cartoons/3211497/Cartoonist-Matt-makes-his-mark-with-a-gentle-touch.html

amazing to think that you could pick any random weekday over the last 37 years and somewhere there are five corresponding Matt pocket cartoons about contemporary news stories that the then editor of the Daily Telegraph didn't consider funny enough to run

matt needs to get himself on patreon is what this makes me think

all i see is the wasted effort in redrawing it. could've just changed the text.

amazing to think that you could pick any random weekday over the last 37 years and somewhere there are five corresponding Matt pocket cartoons about contemporary news stories that the then editor of the Daily Telegraph didn't consider funny enough to run

what percentage use the Rumplestiltskin joke tho?

Slightly mystified that he bothered to re-draw it.

100% of his work is cock-and-balls for faces and he redraws it every time! he loves to redraw!

this is why he's good not bad btw and the rumpelstilstkin development simply affirms this

He gets up every day to do the same task, like some zen buddhist monk.

correct

Once saw an original Wizard of Id strip where they'd simply pasted in new dialogue on old drawings.

And I think it's a Fleet Street tradition for the daily cartoonist to show the editor a number of different roughs (Mac of the Daily Mail: "Here's a slightly racist one, here's a very racist one...")

Editor: "No, they're still not racist enough".

kickstarter for an A3-sized coffee table book on glossy 250gsm paper with every matt cartoon including rejected drafts, each on its own page, with a critical essay from mark s

yes but it's A2-sized

every other page of the book should be printed on that translucent butter paper type material, and the translucent pages have the full cartoons printed on them and the normal pages just the cock-and-balls shapes with everything else removed

Why is Rumpelstiltskin so angry in the first cartoon?

i: he's called rumpelstiltskin (ugly name)
ii: he has to listen all day to bad guesses what his real name is (annoying and humiliating)
iii: he has issues! when his name is is correctly guesses he stamps so hard his foot goes through the floor and when he tries to pull it out he tears himself in two!!
iv: thank you for reading, we've been the GRIMM brothers

And yet he seems quite chill in the second cartoon.

hard to stay that angry for five years

evil imps will turn the site of their defeat into comedy shtick rather than go to therapy

clearly Rumplestiltskin is an author insert

I think it's a nice name tbh

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F4zCD4baQAE2ZvY.jpg

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2025/aug/04/stephen-lillie-labour-small-boats-distraction-cartoon

Just unbelievably literal in comparison with the headline.

How sad was the moment when he decided to put "distraction" in text at the top.

Why is Rumpelstiltskin so angry in the first cartoon?

the COVID rules could be quite confusing, they often changed and sometimes seemed contradictory - this was especially true on the lead up to xmas 2020

Also having to give back that baby he kidnapped I expect.

Always peeves me whenever I have to do that.

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/81b6aff98123f050dbc9c85db8a20500083fed9c/45_46_746_569/master/746.jpg

daughter of matt does it again

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/81b6aff98123f050dbc9c85db8a20500083fed9c/45_46_746_569/master/746.jpg?width=480&dpr=2&s=none&crop=none

?

It drives me nuts how she still hasn’t bothered to find out how venn diagrams work; neither in maths nor in the popular imagination.

Couldn't just draw the Predator handshake I guess.