exploding sheep
The cartoons and graphics in this collection represent six years of sporadic work in the cause of anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-ecodestruction, anti-racism and anti-war. It's propaganda without the lies.
Unsurprisingly then, none of these cartoons have appeared in the mainstream press while all of them have appeared in student or independent progressive media or were self-published. The readerships in these places are miniscule, the pay is effectively non-existent. But what you get in return is open season editorial and it's a great way to work. No following the government agenda with Westminster or Capitol Hill caricatures 5 days a week for your corporate liberal newspaper. No £1 million a year editors telling you they love your work.
The first cartoons appeared simultaneously in a fortnightly university union newspaper and on the ZNet Toons website, part of the massive ZNet site which styles itself as a resource for people interested in progressive politics. Later cartoons and graphics were posted to Indymedia and later still to www.shimmerytimbers.com, a website specifically created for these cartoons. A number of works were done for activist groups and the resulting cartoons have also occasionally appeared on their websites. Working without deadlines for most of the time, the number of images evens out over the years to about one every two weeks. Not prolific but not workshy.
The visual style at the start of the collection owes something, though only a little, and that's in the framing, to the cartoons of Guardian staffers Rowson and Bell. Somewhere down the way, along with the Guardian subscription, that gets dropped. There are no other direct influences, except perhaps Ron Cobb whose 60s/70s cartoons acted as an inspiration for political cartoon potential rather than anything stylistic. The style within the frame stays pretty much the same throughout though it has to weather some mood swings and medium changes. The cartoons in the first days of the Iraq war are a good example of this. Then there are the graphics, a medium with a long and honest tradition of political resistance.
A necessary by-product of rejecting capitalism, imperialism, war etc, and something which is evident in the images early on, is a recurring anti-Americanism.
While there have been in the last six years, other countries or groups around the world which have waged, or are still waging, small wars of acquisition or tyrannies against their own peoples - Israel, Burma, Indonesia, Mexico and, yes, Iraq - as lethal and appalling as these have been, they are small, local situations compared to the global havoc wrought by the American government. It isn't a case of unfairly picking on America as though it were one country among many with a bad record. The numbers killed through American warmongering and economic dictation are in the millions, facts well documented by reputable sources.
Non-American tyranny, terror and oppression can often, in fact can usually be traced back to Washington. Al-Qaeda, for example, grew out of the Mujahadeen, a resistance movement funded and ideologically manipulated by the CIA which revivyfied the concept of jihad after centuries of dormancy. Then there are the death squads of South America, the barbaric and artificially empowered Saudi monarchy, the genocidal generals of Indonesia... and so it goes on.
One small example of this whole bloody grotesqueness was the routine bombing of sheep in Iraq during the Clinton years and at the beginning of the Bush II presidency.
"Southern Iraq, 1 woman killed, 1 civilian injured & 13 sheep killed." So reads a report by AP from 29 June, 2000 - one of many like it from 'inter-war' Iraq in which civilians and even livestock were the targets of American and coalition ordnance. Exploding sheep in the middle of nowhere... This was incompetence bred from an arrogant contempt for life. And anyway, what were these people doing bombing the country in the first place? Despite the anti-war demonstrations of 2002-03, for most people in the UK, the military actions of the American imperium were then and are now quite simply supported. Regardless of whether people were ignorant or just too self-interested to care, the cartoons aimed to present some unpopular facts. Some of those who did care were American and a few of them - Paul Robeson, Phil Ochs, Bill Talen - are recognised in these cartoons .
The cartoons themselves are supplemented by comprehensive news or background reports to help make sense of some of the now obscure detail. Most of this material is contemporary with the cartoon, not backward-looking, historically skewed analysis. Special mention should go to John Pilger and ZNet who, in the early days, provided a number of stories for illustration.
The stories, the progressive take on mainstream news, the alternative array of suppressed or shouted down facts, comes almost exclusively from the internet. Internet cartooning, posting work to the web as part of the array, also gets away, to some extent, from the parochialism of national dialogue. It globalises anti-globalisation and the people involved in it. As part of this process many of these cartoons have been translated into languages other than English for free use on activist websites or in newsletters. It's an ongoing project.
Some cartoons were specifically drawn for activist groups and work is supplied free to not-for-profit organisations. All new and past work is posted to www.shimmerytimbers.com, a website also featuring articles and photographs.
- october 2006
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