An anti smoking cartoon that parodies cigarette advertising.

This is an anti-smoking cartoon parody of a cigarette advertising campaign for John Player Special cigarettes in the early 1980s.

The cigarette packets were black, and the advertising campaign relied on a number of visual puns and word plays on the word black (using the similarity between the words ‘black’ and ‘back’) – word plays such as “Black chat” (with a photo of two packs of cigarettes looking as though they were talking to each other) and “Flash black” (with a photograph of a cigarette packet surrounded by flashes of lightning).
My parody or spoof advert used similar plays on the word black, but giving it a negative spin such as by using the term “Black death” (with a skull made out of cigarette packets), “Black to the land” (i.e. being in a grave, with a cigarette packet as a gravestone) “Blackstabber” (being stabbed in the back with a cigarette) and “Black against the wall” (being against a wall with a firing squad – the bullets being cigarettes).
This is an anti-smoking cartoon or illustration that was drawn when cigarettes were still advertised on bill boards or advertising hoardings in Britain.
An extra touch in the illustration is the figure who is walking out of the cartoon to the left. It is a figure who is wheeling a shopping basket in the form of a John Player Special cigarette packet. The hand clutching the basket is a skeleton, because the figure is death.
A cartoon against the tobacco industry.

Cartoon reference number: a064