Martin Rowson

British satirist and cartoonist Martin Rowson’s acerbic chronicles of the evolution—or rather, regression—of politics in the last two decades. In 1997, on top of his regular visual contributions to the Tribune, Martin Rowson—the veteran mouthpiece of the Left of the British Labour Party—started writing a monthly column in the paper’s “As I Please” section, which was George Orwell’s slot fifty years earlier. Through his columns, Rowson chronicled the changing tides and tsunamis in the current political scene, documenting the rise of nationalism and the right-wing in these prescient musings. Over the next two decades, he pondered everything—the ideological battles inside Labour, the psychopathology of the Tory Party, the London Zoo, the British class system, Doctor Who, terrorism—and anything else that came to mind a day or so before the deadline. Here, for the first time, a selection of these columns has been collected alongside Rowson’s other textual journalism, from tiny underground magazines in the United States to contributions to the Guardian, the Independent, and many other mainstream publications, on subjects ranging from the Charlie Hebdo massacre to his favorite books.

Hans Holbein’s 16th-century masterpiece, The Dance of Death, reminds its readers that no one, no matter their rank or position, can escape the great leveller, Death. In a foreboding series of woodcuts, Death, depicted as a skeleton, intrudes on the lives of people from every level of society, from the sailor to the judge, the ploughman to the king. By highlighting our common fate, Holbein exposes the folly of greed and ambition, and in doing so brings a corrupt and callous elite crashing back down to earth. In this darkly satirical update, Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson sharpens and reshapes Holbein’s vision for the 21st century. Death seizes the City banker by his braces and offers a light to the oligarch; it joins the surgeon in theatre and the Hollywood star on the red carpet. Filled with wit and doom-laden drama, Martin Rowson’s The Dance of Death is a masterful reimagining of a book which, in its uncompromising treatment of the rich and powerful, paved the way for the great, levelling craft of political cartooning.

The first book to tell the visual story of the USSR’s war against religion of all denominations, from the 1917 revolution to its fall in 1991 ‘We’ve finished the earthly tsars and we’re coming for the heavenly ones!’. Thus spoke the Soviet Union’s first atheist propagandists as they declared war on ‘the opium of the people’ across the USSR. Soviet atheism is the great lost subject of the 20th century. Pope Pius XI led a ‘crusade of prayer’ against it. George Orwell satirised it in Animal Farm. The Nazis called it a Jewish plot. Franklin D Roosevelt pressured Stalin to abandon it. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn blamed it for Russia’s catastrophes. Ronald Reagan put it at the core of his ‘Evil Empire’ speech. And yet, because the Soviet Union promoted atheism almost entirely for domestic consumption, decades’ worth of arcane and astonishing antireligious imagery remains unknown in the West. Drawing on the early Soviet atheist magazines Godless and Godless at the Machine, and post-war posters by Communist Party publishers, Roland Elliott Brown presents an unsettling tour of atheist ideology in the USSR. Here are uncanny, imaginative and downright blasphemous visions from the very guts of the Soviet atheist apparatus: sinister priests rub shoulders with cross-bearing colonial torturers, greedy mullahs, a cyclopean Jehovah, and a crypto-fascist Jesus; Russian cosmonauts mock God from space while vigilant border guards nab American Bible smugglers. Godless Utopia is the occult grimoire of a lost socialist anti-theology.

Published in 1848, at a time of political upheaval in Europe, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifesto for the Communist Party was at once a powerful critique of capitalism and a radical call to arms. It remains the most incisive introduction to the ideas of Communism and the most lucid explanation of its aims. Much of what it proposed continues to be at the heart of political debate into the 21st century. It is no surprise, perhaps, that The Communist Manifesto (as it was later renamed) is the second bestselling book of all time, surpassed only by the Bible. The Guardian’s editorial cartoonist Martin Rowson employs his trademark draftsmanship and wit to this lively graphic novel adaptation. Published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, The Communist Manifesto is both a timely reminder of the politics of hope and a thought-provoking guide to the most influential work of political theory ever published.

A stocking-fodder sensation of classic Christmas carols told through the brilliantly British medium of pun, by the internationally renowned Guardian cartoonist, Martin Rowson.Carol Carnage takes the first verse and chorus line of five world-famous carols and renders them into stunning pen-and-ink puns, brimming with English eccentricity, invention and Christmas-crackerly bawdiness. Whether it is the frosty beauty of In the Bleak Midwinter maliciously misheard as the vomit-spackled Ian the Greek,Mid-wine Tour or the trumpeting joy of God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen spitefully styled as a husband and wife drunkenly heckling one another in Got Dressed Yet Mary? Gin Till Morn!, the internationally renowned cartoonist Martin Rowson unrepentantly takes aim at po-faced carol enthusiasts and dangerously earnest Christmassers the world over.

Since 2010, Martin Rowson has been documenting the highs and lows – mainly the lows – of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition week after week in The Guardian, as well as in The Morning Star, Tribune and many other publications. This book collects Rowson’s best, most brutally funny, cartoons from a period that began with a “big, open, comprehensive offer” to Nick Clegg, continued on through riots, phone-hacking, double-dip recession, and endless debates on Europe, and will end (perhaps) with the general election in 2015. Accompanied by witty explanatory text, The Coalition Book takes a biting satirical look at Cameron and Clegg’s first – and perhaps last – five years in charge. The book contains a foreword by Will Self.

On 5 November 1699, the Merchant Ship Antelope foundered on a rock at the Latitude of 30 degrees 2 minutes south. The only survivor of the crew was the ship's physician, Lemuel Gulliver, who some hours later awoke, bound by hundreds of tiny ropes, lying on a beach in the Empire of Lilliput.On 31 August 1997, Gulliver's direct (although unwitting) descendent was being driven back from a conference in Paris when, travelling through an underpass, his vehicle was struck with great force from behind. Rendered unconscious, he was next aware of being thrown from a helicopter into a shallow sea. On awaking next morning, he found himself bound by hundreds of tiny ropes, lying on a beach and surrounded by tiny figures welcoming him to... a modern Lilliput.This is only the beginning of his adventures, as he finds himself, quite by chance, visiting the same places as his famous forebear, only three centuries later. Thus the Modern Gulliver learns how history has unfolded for the Lilliputians, discovering the secrets of the 'New' Lilliput's economic boom and accidentally precipitating its crash. He finds out how the giants of Brobdingnag were inspired to transform their way of life by his ancestor's example, impressed by their encounter with one of 'the most pernicious Race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the Earth'. Then, after witnessing the diplomatic initiatives of the floating island of Laputa, the immortal Struldbruggs and other medical miracles in Luggnagg, he's finally shown exactly what the Houyhnhnms now do with their surplus Yahoos...Jonathan Swift's classic satire about little people, big people, mad scientists and rational horses has not only gripped our imaginations for generations, it is also one of the greatest - yet most compassionate - indictments of humanity ever written. Martin Rowson's caustic and provocative updating of the story is both a homage to the original and an entirely up-to-date indictment of the enduring human idiocies that enraged Swift so magnificently and memorably 300 years ago.

In Martin Rowson's "The Waste Land", private detective Chris Marlowe is tasked with getting to the bottom of the most impenetrable of all modernist mysteries: namely T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland". Cunningly contrived, this irreverent graphic parody is inspired in equal parts by the classic modernist poem and by the American noir novels of Raymond Chandler. Marlowe, searching for his dead partner's killers, is lured into a web of murder, deceit, lust, despair, and, of course, a frantic quest for the Holy Grail. Doped, duped, pistol-whipped, framed by the cops, and going nowhere fast, Marlowe enters a nightmare world where Robert Frost, Norman Mailer, and Edmund Wilson drink in the gloom of a London pub; where Auden is glimpsed entering the men's room; where Henry James, Aldous Huxley, and Richard Wagner share an ice cream aboard a Thames pleasure steamer; and where, out of luck and out of clues, Marlowe finally tracks down T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Available again for the first time in a decade, this is an unforgettably strange trip through modern literature with one of Britain's best writers and illustrators.

Tolerated in Britain for over 300 years-and ubiquitous throughout the world for much longer - visual satire gives offence in the quickest way and in its purest form. Cartoons have long since established themselves as a legitimate part of the general political discourse. As a cartoonist, it is Rowson's job to give offence. But the flip side of giving offence is, of course, giving comfort to the opponents or victims of the offended. In "Giving Offence", Rowson explains how and why cartoons work, why they matter and why the reactions of the offended are often an even blunter political weapon than the cartoons themselves. This book is in collaboration with "Index on Censorship".

A few months after two of his parents had died, Martin Rowson had a dream about the house he grew up in which was crammed with tons and tons of stuff, both physical and emotional. In this book Rowson delves into all that 'stuff'; weaving together dreams, family anecdotes and gossip, jokes, advice, history, smells, sounds and sights of the past. The result is a funny, thought-provoking and ultimately moving meditation on families, life, love, disease and the existentialist horrors of clearing out the attic.

'As with dogs, so with gods - by and large, you should blame the owners.'A particular trait, common to all human civilisations, is the worship of non-human entities with followings of devotees who claim that their reverence can transport them to transcendental heights of complete and unfettered love. Do we mean God?