Cartoonist Martin Rowson of Britain's The Guardian talks about the pluses and minuses of seeing his work distributed globally.

An excerpt from The Guardian:

One the many joys of working for the Guardian is that the political cartoons I draw for the paper on Mondays (and when Steve Bell is away) also appear on the website. This means that I've been globalised. The only slight drawback is that the webmasters and mistresses at Guardian Unlimited gently insist that my email address should also be published under each cartoon.

It's not that I don't appreciate the occasional bits of fan email I get from around the world. I do. I don't even mind the letters from French and German schoolgirls who've been told to deconstruct one of my cartoons for their English homework, and the rare messages from punters wanting to put in a bid for original artwork are, of course, a joy. It's just that my globalisation means that every time I draw a cartoon critical of George Bush my inbox gets inundated with a tidal surge of hate mail.

 

I'm not alone, of course. Steve Bell gets it too. In fact the first piece of digital bile I received asked me why I drew Mr Bush as a monkey, when he was the president of the United States of America and I was just a schmuck. I politely replied that I never had, and that my correspondent had got the wrong lefty cartoonist. I got a reply saying I was an asshole anyway.

However, my cartoon of November 1 2004 second-guessing the outcome of last year's presidential election really opened the floodgates. My jovial prophecy - that the election would be a draw, the Republicans would then cheat and that a new US civil war would break out - inspired around 400 outraged Americans to send me abusive email, most of it along the lines of "you'd be speaking German now if it wasn't for us, you limey asshole".

At this point I still thought it my duty to reply to these emails, so again I politely pointed out that if the US hadn't entered the second world war in December 1941 there would have been no D-Day and no second front, the Red Army would have swept through Nazi Germany and into western Europe and that, in fact, I'd now be speaking Russian. And, incidentally, the US would have lost the cold war in about 1958.