Daily Mirror and Daily Express cartoon strips available

[Lew Stringer]

I can't find that particular cartoon at a quick search but Cummings seems to have drawn quite a few with Michael Foot waving his stick about. I can't say I found his style particularly appealing or amusing from the ones I saw but political cartoonists are under a lot of pressure to deliver the goods on a daily basis so they can't hit the mark every time I suppose.



Lew

[Digifiend]

Soviet fish! Guess that one dates from the height of the Cold War.

[Brendan McGuire]

I've tried the University of Kent cartoon archive to no avail. The Express Newspaper online archive doesn't appear to go back any further than the day before yesterday (a mild exaggeration on my part)! The cartoon must have been drawn between 1980 and 1983 and I suspect it would be more likely to be in the run-up to the 1983 election.

[Peter Gray]

It said on the website it had lots of years of the Daily Express online to see...not just the 80's...20's...30's..etc..


Online Now
Daily Mirror Archive 1903 - current
Daily Express Archive 1900 - current
Sunday Express Archive 2000 - current
Daily Star Archive 2000 - current
Daily Star Sunday Archive 2002 - current

[Matthew]

Hello Brendan

I'm not normally one for arguing on the internet and initially only posted on this thread in order to answer a couple of questions that had been posed. To this I added the opinion that Cummings was good at drawing. Since then you’ve suggested that his approach to political cartooning differed from that of Steve Bell, Scarfe, Gillray et al in that these artists restrict their attention to providing informed comment whereas Cummings exercised "a playground mentality" in his potrayal of a public figure. For the sake of historical accuracy I'll take a few moments to answer this point.

I don’t share your view that Cummings’ response to Michael Foot’s apparent comedy and song routine by depicting him as eccentric differs from depictions by other cartoonists of public figures throughout history, the examples you have listed featuring among them. Gillray speculated on the private life of Napoleon, depicting him peeping through curtains at cavorting female nudes, Steve Bell has repeatedly portrayed George Bush as an ape (on one occasion basing a drawing on his real-life altercation with a pretzel), Scarfe has depicted Nancy Reagan in a sexually explicit manner, Michael Howard as a vampire and Harold Wilson and Edward Heath as clowns. It could be argued that none of these represent a meaningful grapple with political ideology or confrontation of double-standards (and all political cartoonists have slow news days to contend with) and yet you describe these artists as doing so whereas Cummings displayed "a playground mentality".

I’m actually quite a fan of all of these artists and others and don’t see a significant difference in their approach as opposed to that of Cummings. A straight line can be drawn from Philipon's famous depiction of Louis Philippe as a pear, and Cummings' exaggerated characterization of an eccentric (on this occasion and in Cummings’ opinion) Michael Foot. The only reason that I can imagine that anyone would excuse the former examples whilst taking exception to the latter would be if they had a particular fondness for the target. Although (from your description) Cummings’ Foot cartoon doesn’t sound particularly inventive in its concept it seems rather a mild example to use as a reason for banishing a cartoonist to the school playground. At least by this reasoning he’d be in talented company there, sharing the Naughty Corner with Scarfe, Gillray, Bell, Steadman and many others who have invented humorous characterizations based on the foibles of our public figures.

Anyway you'll be pleased to learn that this will be my final contribution to the thread and I’ll conclude it by offering the following link to a collection of Cummings cartoons dating from the forties to the nineties:

http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/search/cartoo ... ummings%22

Have a good week.

Matthew.

[Brendan McGuire]

Matt, please don't feel you have to exclude yourself from contributing anything extra to this thread. It's a free country.
I haven't expressed myself very well, so I'm going to put a few cards on the table. I disagreed completely with Cummings' politics and I found his stance on most things to be personally, totally repugnant. So, I start off with an in-built antipathy towards his work. That said, I don't like his drawing style. The rigidity in his facial features is a case in point. The expression on Mrs. Thatcher's face hardly varies at all from drawing to drawing. I fully accept that once a cartoonist feels that they have "captured" a public figure's essence (so to speak) it would be difficult to let go of that template (Bell's Bush for example). To digress a little - this wasn't a problem for Low when he was depicting Hitler.
The nub of my point is that the likes of Bell and others would use that template to make a point. The Bush/Ape would be placed within a situation reflecting current events with Bush's attitude to those events according to Bell's vision. The particular drawing of Michael Foot to which I keep referring (but I am annoyingly unable to find) had nothing whatsoever to say. It wasn't even in context with the news item. It was just a personal attack on an individual.
So there!