After checking out John Welding’s Drawing The City exhibition at Wakefield Art Gallery Jez and myself decided we might as well check out the rest of the art while we were there. I mean, it wasn’t comics but it might be worth a gander. As we made our way upstairs Jez called me back. There, at the foot of the stairs, was an unassuming portrait of a man full of of the smug power of youth. It looked not unlike this:
The card was what had caught Jez’s eye. This is a 1952 portrait of Donald Rooum, a cartoonist of some minor legend within the British underground comics scenes. I never had any connection with him but his name kept cropping up whenever you delved into those parts of comics that crossed over with the radical politics brigades for Rooum is part of the tradition of anarchist cartoonists. I never met him, nor, if I’m honest, am a big fan of his work, but it holds an important place in the history of Brit comics, somewhere between the anarchic-yet-establishment work of Leo Baxendale in The Beano and the anarcho-punk sensibility of Simon Gane‘s 90-s era Arnie.
Anyway, there’s a story about the gallery tracking down Rooum here and a whole load of his Wildcat strips here for your enjoyment.