Drawing on sentiment during terror

On Thanksgiving Day last week, more than 100 members of the American National Cartoonists' Association dropped their usual story lines to stage a collective act of tribute to the victims of the 11 September terrorist attacks. While the continuing national trauma in America is understandable, most of this stuff was pretty mawkish, perhaps the worst being the eternal GI Beetle Bailey riding an American eagle past a cloud labelled "Peace".

Such levels of solidarity and, indeed, self-denial, are unlikely to happen among British cartoonists in any circumstances, even after something as horrifying as the attacks on the World Trade Center. True, in the immediate aftermath most cartoonists exercised some levels of self-censorship: I was initially too numb to do anything other than the kind of "why, oh why" cartoons I normally deplore. At least I got them published, unlike cartoonists Tom Halliday and Martyn Turner, who both had cartoons rejected by The Scotsman, being told to draw something less critical of America. Financial Times pocket cartoonist Jeremy Banks had it worse: he was instructed to leave the whole subject alone and to concentrate on other, unrelated news stories (of which there were none). Steve Bell didn't feel so constrained in The Guardian, which, on 13 September, ran a cartoon of Bush saying We re gonna bomb abroad!

The following Monday, I said on Radio 4 s Front Row that in his place I wouldn t have drawn a cartoon like that so soon after the event, when cheap gags seemed inappropriate. The next day Steve and I had a full-and-frank exchange of views in which he called me a pompous c*** and berated me for drawing a weeping Statue of Liberty for The Mirror, while I called him an insensitive w***** . Interestingly, Times cartoonist Peter Brookes upbraided me for callous insensitivity for my cartoon in that day s Guardian, showing a bruised and battered Uncle Sam swallowing Fast Acting Pain Relief Missiles and ignoring the Middle East tumour on the back of his neck.

The destruction of the twin towers was an act of such unbelievable horror that, in a way, it almost has to be taken out of context and left untouchably alone by cartoonists wielding their bluntest of blunt instruments. But the political consequences of that atrocity are fair game. After all, isn't the freedom to attack our leaders as hypocritical, sanctimonious megalomaniacs one of the freedoms we're supposedly fighting this supposed war for? As a profession, unlike our American colleagues, British cartoon-ists are more detached. Having recovered from the specific events of 11 September, we have reacted to the War Against Terrorism in the way we react to everything - which is pretty much no-holds-barred with as much as our editors will let us get away with (there's nothing new there).

And among ourselves, life for cartoonists carries on as normal. As I heard the Standard s Patrick Blower say gleefully to Steve Bell in the pub a couple of weeks ago: Not having a very good war, are you, Steve?

Martin Rowson, chairman of the British Cartoonists' Association, presents the Young Cartoonist of the Year awards tonight.