Talking Movies: From Zap to Zapiro – Episode 1
Welcome to Talking Movies, I’m Spling. This week we begin Episode 1 of From Zap to Zapiro…
So Zapiro, it is such an honour to have you on Talking Movies and I have been following your work for since I can remember and as a political commentator and national treasure I am so pleased to be able to have this conversation with you about the documentary The Showerhead, but of course also your career in a more broad overview. Welcome.
Thank you. Thank you. Great to be with you and I often hear your reviews.
Well, yes, I heard that and I needed to hear it from you yourself because I wasn’t quite sure whether to believe it or not. I mean, wonderful to hear that. So what inspired you to become a political cartoonist?
Well, you know, I’d always wanted to be a cartoonist. I didn’t know necessarily a political cartoonist. I thought I might want to be a comic artist. I might want to be… I loved Giles when I was a very small kid. I loved looking at the Giles book, the covers in particular.
There would be the intricacy and the funny kind of body language and the incidents and all of that. And I’ve done drawings like that, certainly with Giles in mind, but I didn’t really understand that that was political. I mean, he’s kind of soft political, even though he was a bit of a lefty, you know, and I could see that my understanding became a little more sophisticated.
And then, you know, I was inspired by Tintin and Peanuts and a lot of other things. And I think the first kind of political cartoons that I really responded to were when I was a teenager and I saw the cartoons that are really neglected in the sort of national discourse by David Marais. Drawings weren’t perhaps as refined as some of the other cartoonists who get much more play in the compendiums and when people speak about some of the cartoonists of the apartheid era.
To me, he was head and shoulders above the others in terms of his crazy head, journalistic training, lefty kind of approach. So for me, he’s my political inspiration in cartooning.
I grew up with Giles and Tintin. It must have been such a thrill for you to see your own work appearing alongside the likes of Giles…
Very much so. In fact, I certainly remembered aspects of both Giles and Tintin when I was putting my first annual and all the others and the other four specials. I’m on my 29th annual now and I’ve done four specials as well. So that’s a hell of a lot of books. My covers are quite different from Giles’ covers because these are really sitcoms, which I do for cartoons themselves. That big signature, that comes from Giles. Eventually putting all my annuals on the back of my own annual each time I published them… that comes from Tintin.
What’s the biggest change you’ve noticed if you compare your earlier work with more contemporary cartoons?
You know, when I started doing cartoons in the 80s, I think many of us were quite strongly influenced, not by the mainstream, those of us working in alternative media and those of us working in the political genres of cartooning.
So for me, I was working on UDF and alternative media. Many of us, I think, were quite influenced by the English graphic satirists who weren’t really editorial cartoons then. One of them has become an editorial, Gerald Scarfe.
But Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe, that vicious, powerful stuff with lots of spatter and extreme caricature and all of that. And the best exponent of that in this country was Derek Bauer, who was a Steadman fanatic. But he was so talented graphically as well, and much more talented than the rest of us, that he could actually do that style.
And then gradually, it sort of became his own style. I think the difference between Derek and me was that I actually took the politics seriously. He didn’t. He unfortunately died quite young. He was a graphic genius. He was the best we’ve ever produced graphically. But I was much more immersed in the politics. And I think something happened as I tried to emulate the Scarfe and Steadman and Derek Bauer and all that. And I realized I could do it okay.
And I could get my message across in that savage way. But I couldn’t have any kind of real nuance. If I was trying to do a sitcom cartoon, as opposed to a strong conceptual one, I couldn’t get the people in the cartoon, I couldn’t get my style to work there.
People relate to the images. And then I went to study in America, I was very influenced by some of the cartoonists I already knew, but I started watching them a bit closer. I was influenced by some of the kind of comic style, more accessible for the ordinary reader, you could really draw someone in and be subversive in what you were saying, but still have a style that wasn’t as vicious.
So I did a real combination of that sort of comic style and all of those things. And even a little bit of the underground comic stuff too. And that old style that I used to use. And I’ve come up with something that I think is much more accessible to the ordinary reader, whether I’m saying something really hard hitting or very light hearted.
