I got drunk and had a mild panic attack with Ralph Steadman, and I am not entirely sure which of those things surprised me more. Steadman, the British artist best known for his explosive ink-splattered collaborations with Hunter S. Thompson, has spent six decades making people feel exactly that way: exhilarated, slightly nauseous, and unable to look away. Spending an afternoon with him, as it turned out, is very much like looking at his work.
The encounter happened on the margins of a small press festival in Wales, where Steadman had agreed to speak on a panel about illustration and political cartooning. He arrived late, wearing paint-stained trousers, carrying a bag that clinked in a way that announced itself before he did. He did not apologise for being late. He sat down, opened the bag, and produced a bottle of red wine and two plastic cups. "You look like you need a drink," he said to me, without any preamble, and he was right.
Art as aggression, and as honesty
Steadman's work has always functioned as a kind of controlled aggression. His portraits stretch and distort faces into something grotesque but recognisable, the way a truth stretched far enough eventually circles back on itself. When he worked with Thompson on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and their coverage of the 1972 US presidential campaign, the partnership produced something that no straight journalism could have: a visceral, funny, morally furious account of power and its discontents. Steadman drew what Thompson felt, and what Thompson felt was rarely comfortable.
I asked him whether he thought that brand of confrontational, feeling-first journalism still had a place in contemporary media. He refilled my cup before answering. "It never really had a place," he said. "That was the whole point. You had to make the place yourself, or blow a hole in the wall." He laughed. I laughed. Then I noticed my heart was doing something odd. That would be the panic attack, arriving fashionably late to catch up with the wine.
The panic attack, briefly explained
There is something fitting about having a mild panic attack in the presence of an artist whose entire career has been an exploration of anxiety made visible. Steadman did not make a fuss about it. He noticed I had gone quiet and a little pale, put down his cup, and said, quite calmly: "Breathe. You're thinking too hard about something that hasn't happened yet." It was not advice I expected from the man who drew Nixon as a sweating, flop-eared beast, but it worked.
He talked me through it with the patience of someone who has spent a long time in the company of people on the edge of something. Thompson, by Steadman's own telling in various interviews over the years, operated in a state of permanent controlled catastrophe. Being around that for decades either teaches you to handle chaos or it destroys you. Steadman, now well into his eighties, is clearly the former.
What Gonzo journalism actually means
The word "Gonzo" gets thrown around so loosely now that it has almost lost its edges. It is used to describe anything eccentric or first-person or a little unhinged. But talking with Steadman, you get a cleaner sense of what it actually meant in practice. Gonzo journalism, as he understood his role in it, was about refusing to pretend the reporter was not in the room. The artist, the writer, the observer: they were always part of the story, always contaminating the sample, and the only honest response to that was to put them in the frame.
This is a point worth sitting with in 2026, when media credibility is a subject of nearly constant debate. The pretence of objectivity has taken serious damage in recent years, and audiences are increasingly sophisticated about recognising the choices editors and owners make about what gets covered and how. As the case for challenging corporate journalism has grown stronger, the Gonzo instinct to be honest about your position rather than hiding it behind a false neutrality looks less like recklessness and more like intellectual honesty.
The drawing as a political act
Steadman pulled a pen from his jacket at some point during our second cup and began drawing on a paper napkin. I watched a face emerge from what looked like a spill: sharp eyes, a sagging mouth, an unmistakable aura of self-satisfaction. I did not ask who it was. The napkin went into his bag. The portrait, whoever it was, would presumably appear somewhere eventually, transformed into something that made people uncomfortable in a productive way.
That productive discomfort is the core of his practice, and it connects him to a long tradition of illustrators and cartoonists who have used distortion as a form of truth-telling. Tom Toro, the New Yorker cartoonist, operates in a different register but with a similar understanding that the image can say what the sentence cannot. I thought about what Toro said about the modern artist's condition when he was asked about the economics of cartooning: that the work matters more than the market, even when the market keeps making that position hard to hold.
Leaving slightly altered
By the time the bottle was finished, the panic had settled and been replaced by something that felt more like clarity. Steadman talked about getting older, about Thompson's death in 2005, about what it means to keep making work when the collaborator who understood you best is gone. He was not sentimental about it. He was matter-of-fact in the way that people who have genuinely processed grief tend to be.
He signed the back of my notebook before he left. Not his name, exactly, but a small drawing: a figure, arms out, falling forward into something. Whether it was a stumble or a dive was not clear, and I suspect that ambiguity was intentional. I walked back to the venue for the afternoon session feeling, against all expectation, calmer than I had at the start of the day.
Meeting an artist whose work is built on controlled chaos is a strange tonic for anxiety. The lesson, if there is one, is something Steadman has been drawing for sixty years without needing to explain it: fear is the raw material, not the obstacle. The honest thing is to put it on the page and see what it looks like when you're not hiding from it.