A few weeks ago I managed to see a C-Span presentation with an individual that seemed very addled and seemingly well past the freshness date of sanity. He rambled incoherently between bouts of lurid details about having rather rambling, incoherent adventures with the American icon of gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson. Yet what stood out were these brutal but often darkly funny cartoon illustrations being projected behind him, which sometimes he would expand on...and sometimes just go off on a totally unrelated tangent.

That man was Ralph Steadman. A Briton, Steadman has become most closely associated as an accomplice of Thompson, creating dynamic and distressing caricatures about the paranoid hyperrealism of those around him, and the political beasts -both real and nightmarishly constructed- often at the center of Thompson's writing.

But Steadman has also built a rather large portfolio of book illustrations for several authors (including a disturbing take on Alice in Wonderland and the revered Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce), and a series of labels for . He has done other editorial illustrations for Rolling Stone, The New York Times, the Guardian, and even done design work with ITV's Spitting Image. His work has occasionally been criticized as overly-brutish and in at least two occasions in the last decade, has been banned from both a UK bus terminal, and the entire state of Ohio.

His work marries a certain discrete precision with violent explosions of motion and seemingly arbitrary hurling of ink. Detail is used strategically, often to heighten the grotesque or the humorous (or often, both), with minimalist backdrops that use negative space with almost the same level of starkness that you would see in the work of folks like Saul Bass. His style is quite visceral in his use of various media, and many describe it as a savage, physical method.

If you are not familiar with Steadman, it might be worth your while to become so. If you are, it might be time to get moreso. He has recently released a new visual memoir of his time with HST called The Joke's Over, and it might be worth your while.