Steven William Maclean Bell is an English political cartoonist, whose work has appeared in a number of publications, notably The Guardian from 1981 to 2023. He is known for his left-wing views. Bell was fired from The Guardian in 2023, after drawing a caricature of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during the Hamas-Israel war.
Early life
Born in Walthamstow and raised in Slough, Bell moved with his family in 1968 to North Yorkshire, where he trained as an artist at the Teesside College of Art. He graduated in film-making and art from the University of Leeds in 1974 and trained as an art teacher at St Luke's College, Exeter (now St Luke's Campus at the University of Exeter), in 1975. He taught art for one year in Birmingham, before resigning to become a freelance cartoonist in 1977.
Cartoonist
While still teaching, Bell did unpaid work providing the magazine Birmingham Broadside with illustrations, including a comic strip featuring Maxwell the Mutant who changed into someone different every time he drank a pint of mild.
He had been a friend at university with another student, Kipper Williams, who had become a freelance cartoonist. Bell followed his lead, and some contacts, and despite rejections including being turned down for The Beano he persevered and obtained paid work for part of 1978 with the comic strip Dick Doobie the Back to Front Man for Whoopee!. He made repeated attempts to get work in the London listings magazine Time Out.
When the premiership of Margaret Thatcher began in May 1979, Time Out's news editor Duncan Campbell invited Bell to meet the need for a comic strip on the new government. Maggie's Farm, with animal characters, appeared in Time Out from 1979 to May 1981, then from October 1981 in City Limits. Bell produced another comic strip, Lord God Almighty, for The Leveller during 1980 and 1981. In 1980 he contributed a cartoon interpretation of the lyrics to Ivan Meets G.I. Joe to the inner lyric bag of the Clash's triple album Sandinista! He is probably best known for the daily strip called If..., which appeared in The Guardian newspaper from 1981 until 2021, and from the mid-1990s until 2023 he was also that newspaper's principal editorial cartoonist.
Collections of his cartoons have been published, and he has also illustrated original books in collaboration with authors. He has made short animated films with Bob Godfrey, including a short series of animated cartoons for Channel 4 television in 1999 to mark the 20th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's rise to power, entitled Margaret Thatcher – Where Am I Now? He has appeared in a radio programme about the life of 18th-century caricaturist James Gillray. Earlier in his career, he wrote and drew the Gremlins comic strip for the British comic Jackpot.
Bell's parodies include Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (in an editorial cartoon about the UK Independence Party); William Hogarth's The Gate of Calais about the ban on UK meat exports following outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease and bovine BSE; and – before the 2005 United Kingdom general election when it briefly seemed as if the Liberal Democrats might seriously threaten the Labour Party – J. M. W. Turner's The Fighting Temeraire, in which a chirpy Charles Kennedy as tug-boat towed a grotesque and dilapidated Tony Blair to be broken up. Following the death of Thatcher, for his cartoon the next day, 9 April 2013, Bell adapted an illustration by Gustave Doré of Farinata in Dante's Inferno, giving Thatcher the speech bubble "Why is this pit still open??" with reference to the closure of coal mines after the UK miners' strike (1984–85).
Bell's cartoons regularly feature grotesque caricatures, and have sometimes caused controversy as well as receiving critical acclaim. During the November 2012 Israel/Gaza conflict The Guardian published a cartoon by Bell showing the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a puppeteer controlling William Hague and Blair. Dave Rich, blogging for the Community Security Trust, said that the illustration was comparable to those featured in Nazi and other antisemitic publications. While Bell defended his cartoon, the newspaper's readers' editor Chris Elliott concluded in an article on 25 November: "While journalists and cartoonists should be free to express an opinion that Netanyahu is opportunistic and manipulative, in my view they should not use the language – including the visual language – of antisemitic stereotypes." The UK's Press Complaints Commission received 22 complaints, but ruled on 19 December that it was unable to take the matter further and that it was "unable to establish a breach of the Code".