About Chris Madden

Hello. Thanks for visiting.
I'm Chris Madden. I'm a professional cartoonist with a particular interest in subjects such as the environment, the sciences, philosophy and politics. I also do quite a few cartoons on less weighty subjects such as gardening and cookery. There are even some cartoons about cats and penguins. See them all on this site.
I've been interested in the human impact on the environment since I was about ten years old – which was in 1962! A book of my environmental cartoons, When Humans Roamed the Earth, was published by WWF (The World Wildlife Fund) in 1991. There's another book of my environment cartoons, When Humans Roamed the Earth, available in my bookshop.
I was a regular editorial illustrator, cartoonist and graphic artist for the Guardian newspaper in the 1980s and 1990s and at about the same time I produced information graphics and illustrations for PA (the Press Association), where I was a very early user of computer graphics (using a very early version of Adobe Illustrator on a very early Mac – the whole process was so slow and lumbering that I assumed it'd never go anywhere).
My cartoons appeared in Philosophy Now magazine for twenty or so years from 1990 and I contributed a weekly cartoon on gardening to the Irish Sunday Independent newspaper (Ireland's highest selling Sunday paper) for the same period. There's a book of my gardening cartoons here.
For several years in the 2000s I produced a regular cartoon strip for the journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry. and I had regular slots in the BBC science magazines Focus and Knowledge..
My work appears in numerous educational and academic publications by publishers such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Open University Press, Nature and more.
My cartoons have also put in brief appearances in feature films and on television, such as in the film The Iron Lady, about Margaret Thatcher, and in the Channel 4 thriller Utopia.
I was born in county Durham in the north of England in 1952.