YOU might have noticed Paul’s cartoon strip in the Saturday edition’s letters’ pages. 
Well, he works in retail and although he has left these shores for the limited promise of bounty across the pond in Canada, distance has not diminished his affection for the Morning Star or the commitment to cheer up our readers with his unique approach to illustrated class struggle.

We emailed him to find out more about the present state of his political mind, his preocupations and such. This is what he told us, verbatim.

Where were you brought up?
The north-west: Liverpool and Cheshire.

What prompted you to start drawing cartoons?
The Muse? One of them Gods? Some deliciously Freudian event involving pens?

Have you any formal training?
Ha!

Your strip is a hilarious observation with quick-witted commentary on work relations particularly bullying management. Is your aim, apart from ridiculing, to cheer up fellow workers, encourage resistance?
Yeah, it’s Dilbert for plebs. My motivation is purely humanist, and I hope front-line customer service workers feel seen. With an increasingly cannibal public gunning for us as much as our overlords, we need all the camaraderie we can get. The political discussions that stem from these real-life scenarios are naturally left-of-centre by default.

Strip or single frame cartooning?
For me, strip: I don’t always need to find a witty punchline, which is good, cos working life often has no punchline. It’s just a shaggy dog story, with no lesson to learn. Or it’s the same lesson, day in day out: work sucks.

Your “selfie” caricature suggest that the bloke giving lip to management might be your good self?
Oh its definitely based on me, or certainly my younger days, actually working hard, while banging my/his head against a quasi-rebellious wall of jaded sarcasm, cos he’s too scared to starve for his beliefs.

Never shits or gets off the pot, just sort of the squats there... farting annoyance. I suspect that makes me another brick in the silent majority wall.

Do you think working class and women cartoonists get a fair crack of the whip?
The internet was probably a mistake, and has made most art free, but there’s more of it now. People who maybe 50 years ago wouldn’t have even tried to express themselves now have a creative outlet, and in this gig economy, can even get the odd sideline commission doing what they love. Hopefully that includes a decent amount the working class, regardless of how they look or who they sleep with.

What does truly piss you off?
Pretty much life in general since the turn of the century. Wage stagnation means money is moving in ever-decreasing circles. We’ve no choice but to spend what little we have on the same things, over and over. That’s bad capitalism.

Between this corporate gangsterism, and greedy governments who misspend, we’re having our financial candle burnt at both ends. At this rate, there might not even be a middle class in 30 years.

For now, I ask you: how the f**k is someone earning a stagnated minimum wage contributing to inflation? You know, besides paying the extortionate rent and grocery bills others set, if they wanna survive?

The strip suggests you draw fast. Is this so? Do you sketch first? When do you know “you got it right”?
I swear I’m a perfectionist. I try to recreate the raw energy of how these picture diaries looked when I first doodled them on receipt paper, at the counter, in-between customers. If it looks authentically hasty, I guess I’ve done my job. Have you noticed the characters’ faces and dialogue fonts change all the time? Or that they don’t even have names yet? It shouldn’t be allowed. It’s all rather punk, eh, old chap?

Your style is unique but are there any cartoonists whose work you particularly like?
I’m flattered, but I suspect my influences show. As an old millennial, I dragged my artistic self up on Ren and Stimpy, Beavis and Butthead, Viz magazine ... proper squalid, cheerful 90’s nihilism.

I wonder how vulgar you’d let me get — after all, retail ain’t pretty, and neither’s the truth.