Dave Brown – the worst cartoonist in Britain

Dave Brown does big ugly drawings for the Independent. He is their lead cartoonist, and his work is awful. Worse than that, it is disgusting. Currently, he is obsessed by shit.

Last Thursday it was Obama, sinking up to his teeth in a river of shit, waving a toilet roll, and saying “ASK NOT HOW DEEPYOUR COUNTRY’S DOO-DOO IS FOR YOU, BUT … …. GLUG!” At first glance it looks like an attack on Obama (not a good idea at the moment), but you slowly realize it’s meant to be sympathetic towards his economic dilemmas.

He is shown misquoting JFK (“Ask not what your country can do for you…”.), but this is a pretty irrelevant attempt to put a gloss on the basic observation that Obama is “in the shit”. Since that isn’t any truer this week than it was on Inauguration Day, it hardly counts as a revelation. What is truly disturbing is the way every floating turd is drawn with loving care. And there are dozens of them.

On Friday 27th Brown was back again with the brown stuff – but this time it was virtual. The immense back end of a huge cat towers over Alastair Darling, who is saying “…AND TODAY I CAN ANNOUNCE THE CONSTRUCTION OF A £325 bn LITTER TRAY!” The cat’s arsehole is just above his head, with the word “RUMBLE!” next to it. The cat, labelled RBS, is about to pour shit all over the Chancellor.

Can somebody explain to Dave Brown that this is just not funny? There is nothing in it that makes you laugh. No perception, no new understanding of the crisis. We all know what RBS has achieved. If we must follow the ghastly metaphor, RBS, and that nice Sir Fred Goodwin, has already shat on the country, and everybody understands that. The “idea” of the cartoon is that this is a “fat cat”. That is a dead cliché, and D. Brown lacks the wit to bring it back to life.

Go back a few days, and we find Brown attacking Brown. It’s Monday 23 February, and the Oscars were awarded the night before. So here is Gordon accepting an award for “WORST PERFORMANCE IN AN ECONOMIC ROLE” (D. Brown can only write in caps). G. Brown is made to say – á la Kate Winslet – “LEHMAN BROTHERS…BERNARD…SIR JAMES…SIR ALLEN…OH..OH GOD! WHO’S THE OTHER ONE….” and then the dud punchline: “…OH, IT’S ME!”

Again, can someone explain to this deluded idiot that there is a difference between crooks like Bernard Madoff and “Sir” Allen Stanford, and G. Brown? And a difference between G. Brown’s attempts to save the situation, and the way the Bush administration let Lehman Brothers go under?

Cartoons work in an instant of understanding. Anybody following the crisis will instantly register the difference between crooks and incompetence, even if they can’t explain it all immediately. In that moment, the cartoon dies.

D. Brown draws G. Brown as a huge fat sweating woman in a purple dress, with a vast stomach and thighs. There is a reason for drawing G. Brown as fat.

A little while back D. Brown met G. Brown at some event. G. Brown said that he wasn’t really that fat. (He isn’t, either: it’s true, and D. Brown must know it, since he has seen the PM close up.) D. Brown came back with a self-serving little article in the Indy, in which he said that owing to this slight, he would now always draw the PM as fat.

What a sense of humour! What perception! What intelligence! What ego!
(There was a photo of the great artist at his board. He has that flat-faced inexpressive Kevin Pietersen look.)

His first effort after that was about G. Brown’s appearance before a Commons Select Committee. GB is shown leaving the room with his trousers burned away, and his buttocks huge and bare, with a hot-cross bun effect drawn on them. And why? Because he has been sitting in “the hot seat”! Top left, the ever-literate DB has a line about “buns”. This is American for the buttocks. It’s not a word that has ever taken in this country, any more than “butt” has.

Another little problem with DB is that his drawing is so heavy. It’s like a lead weight on the joke (if there is a joke). Truly great cartoonists, like Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman, had a light touch and a line that’s worth looking at. Steve Bell is heavy, but quirky – and of course he’s funny, unlike poor struggling DB, who draws like those amateur artists who have to get in every boring detail.

Worst of all for the supposedly liberal Indy, DB is taking the Tory line on the economic crisis – that it’s somehow all the PM’s fault. Dave, if you can listen and not call us all fat – it’s not true, and people out here know it isn’t.

And do try to get rid of the awful clichés – “hot seat”, “fat cat” and “in the shit” aren’t going to make anybody laugh. Cartoons are supposed to give the person looking at them a new perception in an instant. You haven’t done this for a long time.

Salut!