Comic Strips International Magazine cartoons Senior Stripper Club

Michael Heath, Senior Stripper

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D. D. Degg Published: October 30, 2025 Updated: January 26, 2026 1 minute 3 comments

Michael Heath is “a British strip cartoonist and illustrator. Heath has been cartoon editor of The Spectator since 1991.” He turned 90 this month on October 13, 2025 and so joins our list of Senior Strippers.

Wikipedia tells us that over the decades Michael Heath cartoons have “appeared in numerous British publications including Punch, Lilliput, the Evening Standard, The Evening News, The Guardian, The Spectator, The Independent, The Sunday Times, The Mail on Sunday, and Private Eye; all his work is signed simply as ‘HEATH’.”

At age 90 Heath remains the cartoon editor of The Spectator, where we find Mary Wakefield profiling the cartoonist (or here):

I had my first cartoon accepted when I was 15, in 1950,’ he says. ‘How’s that?’ Now, Michael is 90, the Spec is pushing 200 and, he says: ‘I’ve been at the magazine longer than most of its columnists have been alive. Think of that! Actually I think I’m the world’s oldest working cartoonist or something… is that a good thing? Sometimes I feel like my brain is melting.’

Were you a lonely only child? ‘Yes, I suppose so. My mother used to sleep all afternoon and I don’t think my father ever said a word to me. He drew comic strips too – not funny stuff though. Cowboys and Indians for boys’ magazines.’ Why didn’t he talk to you? ‘I don’t think I was his son.’ In all the years we walked about, I never heard this one. Whose son were you? Michael looks pensive. ‘Well, a man turned up at our house once every year. They called him Dogsbody. He smoked continually, hand-rolled cigarettes with his name on. He and my mother, they’d obviously had an affair. He’d bring all this stuff for me, toys, but as soon as he went, my father gave the toys to people next door.’

Michael mentions a couple contemporaries who will become Senior Strippers next year:

Through all the wine, the wives, the changing of locks, he never stops. Drawings pile up around him. I tell him that his cartoons can be cutting, but the drawing never seems angry, unlike other cartoonists, not naming names. ‘You mean Gerald Scarfe and Steadman and that lot?’ says Michael. ‘All those people shouting and falling over, shrieks and splatters? The trouble with that is, it’s always the same picture, isn’t it? It gets old.’