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Senior Strippers Club Welcomes Ralph Steadman on His 90th Bday

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D. D. Degg Published: May 14, 2026 Updated: June 1, 2026 1 minute 0 comments

Ralph Steadman, born on May 15, 1936, becomes a member of The Daily Cartoonist’s Senior Strippers Club.

As Mr. Steadman notes in his website’s biography his cartoon and illustrating career began in 1956 in a style that was not unusual for the time. A style he soon became frustrated with.

‘Cartooning wasn’t just making a little picture and putting a caption underneath. It’s also something else – a vehicle for expression of some sort, protest, or it’s actually a way of saying something which you cannot necessarily say in words.’

In 1961 he wrote to the editor of newly founded Private Eye and began to explore a new, more provocative style.

By the latter half of the 1960s his emerging style was reaching fruition and his fame as illustrator was growing. He was showing up in New Society, Radio Times, Town, New Musical Express, Punch, Private Eye, the Daily Telegraph, the New York Times. And then he met Hunter Thompson and as the Lambiek Comiclopedia puts it, “Steadman [began] a long creative partnership with the American journalist Hunter S. Thompson, drawing pictures for several of his articles and books.”

As a teenager I missed Steadman’s Alice in Wonderland book and his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas collaboration, my first memory of Ralph Steadman is being infatuated by his Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Now Steadman is deservedly celebrated as a master illustrator and political cartoonist. From Wikipedia:

Awards that he has won for his work include the Francis Williams Book Illustration Award for Alice in Wonderland, the American Society of Illustrators’ Certificate of Merit, the W H Smith Illustration Award for I Leonardo, the Dutch Silver Paintbrush Award for Inspector Mouse, the Italian Critica in Erba Prize for That’s My Dad, the BBC Design Award for postage stamps, the Black Humour Award in France, and several Designers and Art Directors Association Awards. He was voted Illustrator of the Year by the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 1979.

If you are lucky you may have seen or will get the opportunity to view the Ralph Steadman: Inklings or the Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing… exhibits.

Much more about Ralph Steadman at his website or his Ralph Steadman: A Life in Ink retrospective..

_{feature image is a Ralph Steadman self-potrait; all images are © Ralph Steadman}