Having retired in April 2025 due to impairment and age related issues I have been continuing with my plan to bring all of my earlier cartoons into a modern, accessible format. Called ‘The Crippen Cartoon Resurrection Project’ this has often involved completely redrawing the original greyscale cartoons, introducing colour and accessible text, and introducing non-gender specific characters from a background of differing impairments and cultures.
Many of these earlier cartoons back in the 1980’s were produced at a time when I was new to the disabled people’s movement, my only real experience of disability and discrimination being as a white, male wheelchair user. My cartoons were all hand drawn and produced as greyscale images. This was mainly due to the fact that most of the magazines and newsletters that I produced work for at this time were printed in black and white. The age of online publications was still waiting around the corner. Also, I didn’t discover the Social Model understanding of disability until the late 1990’s which once found, began to redefine my work from this perspective.
Before retiring I was working with disabled people from all around the world, creating cartoons that reflected their own particular experiences of disability. It became clear to me that many were at the start of discovering their identities as disabled people and had only recently started to challenge the discriminatory practices of their own societies. Many had never heard of the Social Model understanding of disability and found my ‘social model’ cartoons quite an eye opener. This led on to my producing strip cartoons explaining the model in more detail, sometimes including aspects of the different cultures around the world and their particular understanding of disability.
This led to the idea that a collection of my work, containing ‘social model’ based cartoons in particular, could be accessible to all disabled people and their allies and would provide a resource long into the future. By changing my copyright to that of a Creative Commons Licence (BY NC ND) this also insured that my work could not be altered in any way nor used commercially for profit or gain.
I had already produced several collections of cartoons for the UK National Disability Archive (NDACA and NDMAC) and also for Disability Arts Online (DAO). However, what was really needed was an online platform that would allow me to not only display all of my work, but at the same time allow people to download it for educational and campaigning purposes.
There then followed a conversation with Miro Griffiths and Hannah Morgan from the Centre for Disability Studies at the University of Leeds. Together we formulated a plan, and I’m pleased to say that we have started to build an online resource that would provide a platform of my work from the 1980’s to the present time. The fact that I lived in Leeds for most of my childhood and have many friends and contacts at the University, including one of the architects of the disabled people’s movement Professor Colin Barnes, gives an added bonus to this venture.
The Archive is still in its early stages and I’m slowly converting and adding cartoons to the different categories on a daily basis. Once we have a working platform ready, I’ll publish the details here for you to access.
Have a great holiday and a peaceful and happy New Year.
Dave Lupton
24th Nov 2025
Crippen Cartoons 