Cartoonists bid savage goodbye to "Bambi" Blair

LONDON, May 10 (Reuters) They will miss sketching the huge ears, the mad eye, the sinister toothy grin.

Among Tony Blair's most vitriolic critics, Britain's political cartoonists took parting shots today at the man whose easily caricatured face earned them a living for a decade.

''I detest the man and what he's done,'' wrote cartoonist Dave Brown in the Independent. ''But he's great to draw. You put all that bile, hatred and angst into drawing.'' The anger toward Blair has not been subtle. Brown's commentary appeared on the day Blair announced he would resign on June 27, next to Brown's drawing of the prime minister desperately trying to scrub blood from his hands.

Britain's famously savage cartoonists rapiered Margaret Thatcher and made John Major a laughing stock, shirt tucked in his underpants. But Blair, likened to Bambi when he first took power, seems to have attracted special venom.

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, cartoonists have depicted him being dragged by the dogs of war, perched on coffins, surrounded by hellfire and covered in blood.

''As a voter I won't miss him in the slightest. As a cartoonist, I will miss him hugely,'' said Peter Brookes, who draws for the Times.

''BAMBI'' Unlike Major and Thatcher, whose caricatures remained more or less the same throughout their spells in power, Blair's has undergone radical change, becoming increasingly sinister.

''Blair, more than anybody else, has been something of a chameleon,'' said Anita O'Brien, who has curated an exhibit of Blair cartoons at the Cartoon Museum in London.

''He was drawn as Bambi in the early days. Quite cute, with lots of teeth. Sometimes quite effeminate. Slightly film-starish.'' His cartoon persona has become decidedly less benign since the war in Iraq which nearly all cartoonists - unlike many of the newspapers that employ them - said they opposed.

The satirists' main joke on Blair, that he was not always 100 percent truthful, became far more serious, said Brookes.

''To me, the defining thing was the Iraq war and the deceit of getting us into that war. He's always been deceitful because he's a lawyer. But that was of a very different order,'' he said.

Soon many depictions started showing Blair looking evil or insane. The Guardian's cartoonist Steve Bell added a single mad eye that made Blair look deranged.

Bell has spent the last week paying savage tribute with a series entitled ''Bambi, the final hours'', breaking a taboo by daubing an unmistakable Hitler moustache on Disney's baby deer.

In today's strip, Bell showed Blair's presumed successor Gordon Brown beheading the Nazi Bambi on a guillotine.

Cartoon Blair will be a tough act to follow for his presumed successor and long-serving finance minister, said Charles Griffin, former staff cartoonist at the Daily Mail and Mirror.

''I can draw Gordon Brown. But he's a bit duller,'' Griffin said. However, opposition Conservative leader David Cameron, the heir of Thatcher and Major, looks more promising.

''He's got a good face to do. It's quite sort of rubbery.

Shiny forehead. Starey eyes.

''Maybe he'll be prime minister instead of Brown one day and that'll save me.'' REUTERS DS RK1740