Back to my Roots
Just back from an extremely enjoyable trip to the University of Leeds in Yorkshire. This was following an invitation to attend the University of Leeds Disabilities Conference in April 2026 as both a keynote speaker and to facilitate a cartoon workshop. I also had the opportunity to talk about the upcoming launch of the University of Leeds Crippen Cartoon Archive.
Some of you will know that I spent most of my childhood in Leeds, so my visit had a sense of ‘going back home’ to it – albeit some 66 years later! The faculty members and staff of the Disability Studies Unit certainly reinforced this feeling by providing an extremely warm welcome to my wife Helen and myself.
Keynote Speech
I would like to think that my talk was ‘different’; certainly, from the other guest speakers whose focus was more on an academic presentation. With my cartoons running on a large background screen with the occasional speech bubbles containing such expressions as ‘fuck off’ and ‘talking out of his arse’, you can see what I mean by ‘different’.
However, the talk gave me a wonderful opportunity to talk about my life growing up in Leeds, even going to school with the legendary Professor Colin Barnes! How a serious RTA left me using a wheelchair for the first time, and my abrupt fall into the world of second class citizenship as a disabled person. This of course kick started my life as Crippen – disabled cartoonist, and my introduction to the Social Model understanding of disability. From the early 1980’s I began to challenge those negative attitudes and stereotypical portrayals of disabled people, and the rest as they say, is history!
Cartoon Archive
Having tried unsuccessfully to establish a complete online archive of my work, Dr Miro Griffiths and Professor Hannah Morgan of the University of Leeds Disability Studies Unit stepped in and offered to host it for me. The University of Leeds Crippen Cartoon Archive is still in the early stages but once established it will provide a resource for others to use. This will include disabled people and our groups and organisations, academics and researchers, Disability Equality Trainers and teachers.
Protected by a Creative Commons copyright (BY BC BD) this work will not be able to be altered or amended in any way, used for profit or gain and remain as an accurate record of past events. There will also be a section of Crippen cartoon characters which disabled people will be able to download and then cut and paste into their own publications, cartoons, teaching aids and the like.
I’m currently working with Professor Morgan to update the older Crippen greyscale cartoons for inclusion into the archive. Some of these have already been converted during the Crippen Cartoon Resurrected Project (see earlier blogs), although there are still several hundred still to be worked on.
Although I’ve provided smaller timelines of disability related cartoons for both Disability Arts Online (DAO) and the National Disability Archive (NDACA/NDMAC), the University of Leeds Crippen Cartoon Archive will be a more comprehensive collection. This will eventually contain all of the cartoons I’ve created over the past 40+ years and presenting an almost complete record of events that have affected the lives of disabled people during this time. This including the beginnings of the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People (GMCODP), the Telethon protests, the COVID pandemic debacle where so many disabled lives were lost, up to the current undermining of disability legislation and the demonising of disabled benefit claimants.
Pyramid of Arts
During this visit to Leeds, I also had the opportunity to facilitate a cartoon workshop with a group of young disabled artists from the Pyramid of Arts organisation in Leeds. This was facilitated by Dr Jade French, herself a disabled artist and a visiting Research Fellow of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds.
Pyramid of Arts provide an exciting focus on disability arts in the North by investing in people with a learning disability and/or autism, through the discovery, development and disruption of the arts. It is also one of the longest established inclusive arts studios in the UK, providing artists with collaborative group studio sessions.
The group that I worked with were from Pyramid’s ‘Irregular Art School’, which is a project partnership with the University of Leeds, trialling new methods to support the development of learning disabled artists and addressing barriers to inclusion and access. The work that they shared with me was certainly impressive as each artist explored the concept of AI and social media and the pros and cons of safely using this type of platform for their work.
In Conclusion
As I was preparing to leave the University Campus on the last day of the conference I was approached by a student from Brussels. It turned out that they had been a keen follower of my work over the years and wanted to lay down a challenge for me. So, my next blog entry will have to contain a Crippen cartoon about my impressions regarding the conference … watch this space!
Crippen Cartoons 