“Pound of flesh.”

“Sorry? You what?”

“Pound of flesh; Jewish bloke; obvious anti-Semitic trope.”

Recounted in If…Stands Up (Verso), that brief exchange is what ended cartoonist Steve Bell’s four-decade long association with the Guardian last October. Bell was fired (sacked in the parlance of those folks across the pond) over a cartoon of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The war criminal, clad in boxing gloves, raises a scalpel over a scar on his abdomen shaped like the Gaza Strip. “Residents of Gaza,” he says, “get out now!” That this was an actual quote, or that Bell was obviously referencing an earlier cartoon by David Levine with President Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam in the Netanyahu and Gaza roles respectively, made no difference to his employment prospects. The editor chose to read the reference to surgery as an allusion to a quote from Shylock, Shakespeare’s anti-Semitic stereotype from The Merchant of Venice. It’s a tenuous connection, but no matter. In this topsy-turvy world where specious allegations of anti-Semitism are weaponized to defend the indefensible, Bell was out.

If…Stands Up is the latest, “almost certainly final,” collection of Bell’s work, commenting on the last six years of politics on both sides of the Atlantic. His targets, as you would expect, are the powers that be that have made life so precarious for the rest of us: Donald Trump, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Keir Starmer. Using caricature and watercolor, he cuts these figures down to appropriate size. In a discussion with the late Victor Navasky for The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power, Bell expressed pleasure in “getting under people’s skin” or “up their nose.” Readers are invited to take similar pleasure.

The humor in Bell’s work resides at an interesting middle of a Venn diagram. The audience must be intelligent enough to recognize the leader of the right-wing Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland. They must also have enough of a lowbrow sense of humor to find it funny if Boris Johnson’s face is replaced by two arse cheeks or if Donald Trump wears a golden toilet lid in lieu of hair. It has worked for Bell and for the most part it works for me.

Bell displays a knowledge of his satirical forebears. His work is replete with references to David Low and James Gillroy. Low’s assaults on Hitler in the 1930s were so great that British diplomats appealed to him to turn it down. He refused in an act of Bellsian defiance. It’s Gillroy, though, who is the real spiritual predecessor to Bell. Gillroy revealed in his grotesque and scatological caricaturing. The Duke of Norfolk is a drunk, the Duke of Bedford a degenerate gambler, Pitt the Elder “A Toadstool Upon a Dunghill.” Bell homages the last of these with Prince (now-King) Charles in Pitt’s place.

It’s unfortunate, then, that in referencing Gillray’s Fashionable Contrasts, he dips into the sort of liberal homophobia that became so popular after Trump’s first election. The original drawing shows a duke and duchess in the intimate act, all through a view of their shoes. Bell’s version inserts Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Give yourself a prize if you can guess who’s on top. It’s barely a step above the liberal titters Stephen Colbert calling Trump Putin’s “cockholster.”

Just as revealing as Bell’s cartoons is his text commentary. While these give insight into the British political situation at the time they were made, they are also illuminating on the state of British media, especially in Bell’s old home of the Guardian, supposedly a bastion of the Left according to those with a passing interest in politics. In actuality, the Guardian is a centrist, liberal paper only mistaken as a left-wing outlet due to the staunch right leanings of the rest of the U.K. press.

Bell diagnoses liberalism’s (and by extension the Guardian’s) major weakness as “a tendency not to challenge the structures of power over-vociferously, lest they conflict too jarringly with the perceived interests of their core shareholders.”  In Bell’s view, the Guardian “has formed itself into a kind of AUKUS [the military alliance including Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States] of world liberal journalism.” Now, Anglophone readers around the globe can learn that a better world is, in fact, not possible.

The Guardian’s liberal political considerations made Bell’s work increasingly untenable before his ultimate departure. A 2018 tribute to Palestinian medic Razan al-Najjar, shot to death through the Gaza border fence, was pulled over a specious claim that it trivialized the Holocaust. In 2019, another comic mocking Deputy Labour Party leader as “Antisemite Finder General” was refused because “lawyers [were] concerned,” In 2021, Bell’s comic strips ended, being replaced with one-panel cartoons. The deadline for submitting daily cartoons was pushed back from 7:30 to 5:00 PM, in order to give editors more time to decide what is and isn’t worth printing. Eventually, Bell’s work joined the latter category.

The last piece in If…Stands Up was created solely for the book. A four page comic, it too deals Israel’s war on Gaza via gallows humor. Since murdered Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, hides behind Netanyahu’s back. Netanyahu tells his soldiers to beware as these “Hamas like to dress up…as women…as children…as babies in pushchairs…as old men in wheelchairs…as nurses…as doctors…as entire hospitals!” At each statement, we see more victims of Israel’s war. Although the Israeli soldiers try to warn Netanyahu that Sinwar is hiding behind him, he bellows “Don’t always believe what you see! Take him out now!” It’s a fitting summation of everything that makes Bell’s work great.

In 2009, Joe Sacco praised Bell’s cartoons for their fierceness. “It’s like he disembowels his targets,” Sacco noted. These cartoons aren’t ones where the targets can have a chuckle and go about their day. They get under the skin and up the nose. They also helped set the tone for others. In a 2002 interview, the anarchist cartoonist David Roum remarked, “When I’ve got to do a caricature of a politician I look to see what Steve Bell has done, and so does everybody else.”

The global upper crust can rest a little easier that Bell’s ingratiating cartoons will no longer appear in a national newspaper. U.K. cartoonists, on the other hand, will have to find their own ways of depicting “the fuckwits who rule over our lives” (in Bell’s wonderful phrase). If If…Stands Up does end up being Bell’s final collection, ending a series going back to 1983’s The If…Chronicles, it is a high note to go out on.

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