H. M. BATEMAN: The Man Who Went Mad on Paper

"Something went wrong. The plumber fixes it" is a classic for all time, showing the plumber removing his shirt, banging practically everything in sight with his hammer, disappearing through a hole in the wall and finally, with his clients, almost submerged in a flooded bathroom. H.M. Bateman was the cartoonist who created "The Man Who...." series, depicting the embarrassment of doing the wrong thing in a rule-bound society, while at the same time revealing the absurdity of the rules themselves. In this volume accompanying an exhibition by the Cartoon Museum, three authoritative chapters introduce Bateman's life and career, followed by over 100 pages of reproductions of the cartoons. Bateman learnt his trade at evening classes and there was a personal crisis when he had to decide whether to pursue a precarious career as a graphic artist. His reputation was finally established when he moved beyond the "illustrated joke" into his own idiosyncratic vision of the world, and in 1921 a published collection of drawings had an introduction by no less a celebrity than G.K. Chesterton. Locked in battle with the tax office, and with a failed marriage, Bateman's final years were spent on Malta. His artistic success was based on an understanding of what we now call body language, and his strip cartoons were an inspired development of sequences of physical poses. "The boy who breathed on the glass in the British Museum", an early work from 1916, is now itself an exhibit at the BM. "The builder who finished on time" is surrounded by astonished clients and exhausted workmen, and "The tax inspector who said 'please'" creates a similar sensation. 160pp, very large softback.
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