Ralph Steadman

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Ralph Steadman (b. 1936) is a British cartoonist and caricaturist who is perhaps best known for his work with American author Hunter S., drawing pictures for several of his articles and books. He accompanied Thompson to the Kentucky Derby for an article for ‘Scanlan’s,’ to the Honolulu Marathon for the ‘Running,’ and illustrated both ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ and ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.’

Much of Steadman’s artwork revolves around Raoul Duke-style caricatures of Thompson: bucket hats, cigarette holder and aviator sunglasses. As well as writing and illustrating his own books and Thompson’s, Steadman has worked with writers including Ted Hughes, Adrian Mitchell, and Brian Patten, and also illustrated editions of ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ ‘Treasure Island,’ ‘Animal Farm,’ the English translation of Flann O’Brien’s gaelic language classic ‘The Poor Mouth,’ and most recently, ‘Fahrenheit 451.’

Among the British public, Steadman is well known for his illustrations for the catalogs of the off-licence chain Oddbins and he designed a set of four British postage stamps to commemorate the appearance of Halley’s Comet in 1985. He also designed the labels for Flying Dog beer and Cardinal ”Spiced’ Zin’ wine, which was banned in Ohio for Steadman’s ‘disturbing” interpretation of a Catholic cardinal on its label. Steadman also illustrates Will Self’s column in ‘The Independent.’

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