Binned

Thanks to Steve Bell for this. If only Thatcher were well enough to enjoy the sight of disastrously deregulated banks being nationalised throughout the free world....

Memento mori

Steve Bell gets it right, as usual. I wanted to post this next to Tom Raworth's wonderful take on the Hirst skull, but I can't find it anywhere. Perhaps someone can help. (Tom?) It's going to be the season of the crystal skull, I imagine, with the fourth Indiana Jones film and the news that all the crystal skulls in the hands of the world's museums were actually sculpted out of caked snot by a German cheese-maker in the late nineteenth century, or something to that effect. Ho ho.

No, no regrets...

This cartoon is a wonderful example of the way in which the nature of what we understand when we see something can be gradually transformed by a series of minuscule shifts in representation. If you could find anyone in the enviable position of never having come across Bush or Blair in what’s fondly termed real life, I wonder if they’d recognise from photographs these wonderful caricatures that, to us, are such strikingly accurate portraits of the two mean vicious little men they represent. They’re accurate because we’ve been brought here, step-by-step, distoirtion by distortion, by Steve Bell, for me the most visually inventive political cartoonist working in Britain. It would be instructive to trace the history of Blair the poodle from his first appearance, some years ago, to this appalling creature panting slavishly beside his impatient master.