Toon statement

Martin Rowson has always been a bit of a rebel. In his 23 years at Guardian, he was sacked once and resigned another time. “I had an argument with the editor,” he says. His appearance reflects some of it perhaps: a green crushed cotton blazer, worn over a floral print shirt and trousers with suspenders.

Rowson, 51, is known for his political cartoons, including rather violent caricatures of British prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He sees Brown often as a jowly, pink-faced man, while Blair resembles a chimp, with pulled out ears and a rictus displaying a row of enormous teeth. He knows his work is quite visceral.

“I am just less tolerant of politicians. But I recognise that I come from a 300-year-old tradition of laughing at people that includes Jonathan Swift and William Hogarth,” he says.

Rowson was on the panel that judged the entries for the Cartoon Contest on Climate Change held by the British Council. Rowson’s favourite, which came second, had a swinging Tarzan coming to an abrupt halt before tree stumps. He feels climate change cartoons have already evolved a clichéd vocabulary of dead polar bears and rising sea levels. “The success of a cartoon is in slightly tweaking the cliché every time.”

At a workshop at the Government College of Art and Craft, participants were asked to draw a sketch of the cartoonist. “I selected the ones that I hated most. The best was one that drew me as completely bald,” he says.

It is unfortunate that cartoons receive such limited space in most Indian newspapers, he feels. “Even dictatorships have them. We tolerate things much more when we are allowed to laugh at them,” he points out.

Rowson has had his share of trouble. “While I was working for a paper in Dublin, nuns picketed our office because I had made fun of the Pope.” He resigned from the Scotland on Sunday paper because “he was in favour of the Iraq war and I was not. I resigned and felt magnificently liberated”.

In today’s newspaper, cartoonists are often treated like dirt. “When people try to tell me how to illustrate, I tell them why don’t you do it yourself?” One of his all-time favourites is an Eighties’ cartoon in an American newspaper. “The editorial had written in favour of Reagan coming to power. The illustration was a picture of the cartoonist, holding his nose,” he says.


Romila Saha, The Telegraph