By Bel Mooney & Gerald Scarfe (Hamish Hamilton Ltd.)
ISBN13: 978-0241116951
If you’re a grown-up, Christmas is traditionally a time for tales of monsters and horrors so I’ve dredged up this wonderful graphic chiller from a time when ghastly beasts stalked through Britain, sowing discomfort and dread where e’er they trod.
In this cold, dark country the brittle, demonic and so very cruel Mother Claws broods and frets. It’s time once again to put something in the stockings of the Nation’s inhabitants, but she doesn’t want to. She would rather cut things from their stockings – and so she does, with her corpulent, greedy Father Kissmass egging her on.
So carried away are they that her herd of Tamedeer, even Tebbie and Hestle, rebel. On Christmas Eve they ignore her whips and pull her sleigh to a hovel with a star above it. A homeless couple, with a special newborn baby reach out to her needing just a little help…
Father Kissmass And Mother Claws was produced at the height of the Thatcher regime and uses dark, strident imagery from the brilliant Gerald Scarfe to concoct a savage sidebar to the nativity story for devastating satirical effect. This biting allegory of Thatcher’s Britain is infested with her cabinet’s “Big Beasts†tellingly depicted as cowed pack animals by Scarfe’s flick-knife art, whilst Bel Mooney’s prose is as comforting as a velveteen cosh. This is the best of what graphic satire can do. It’s just a pity today’s leaders don’t warrant the same loving attentions…
Text © 1985 Bel Mooney. Illustrations © 1985 Gerald Scarfe. All Rights Reserved.