They have been emitting, as their founding motto has it, 'The stink of excellence in a world gone tits up since 2004.' They are Modern Toss, cartoon chroniclers extraordinaire of the early 21st century, scabrous and sweary inheritors of the mantles of both Hogarth and Viz. And this month the artist duo of Mick Bunnage and Jon Link are being honoured with an anniversary exhibition.
Running at the Drawing Room in Bermondsey, South London, it’s titled Having an exhibition yeah?, with Modern Toss’s – how shall we put it? – f*ck-you insouciance baked into its very title. Here, looking all fancy and large-format, are scrappy scribbles of argy-bargy office drones ('I can’t come in today so f*ck off'; 'I think I’ll go home, I’m a bit bored'); toxic workplaces (at a clifftop coastguard station, a manager declares: “Come on mate, I’m not paying you to look out the f*cking window”); and comic characters such as Mr Tourettes, Awkward C*nt and Gitanes-smoking, beret-wearing Art Dog. The Beano it ain't.
The contemporary workplace is their playground, as befits a partnership that began when Link, then a graphic designer, and Bunnage, a journalist, met while in an office job. Albeit that office belonged to the year-zero ’90s lads' mag Loaded.
'It was very freeform at Loaded,' says Link with admirable understatement of an undeniably creative office with the energy and boundaries of a piss-up in a zoo. 'You could just suggest things and the art department worked with the journalists in creative and weird ways. And that's how I started working with Mick, through discussing ideas and then turning them into something.'
This was less a culture of punching the clock than punching other things, including, occasionally, each other. Hence their proto-Modern Toss work, a cartoon strip published in the magazine called Office Pest.
'It was about experimental violence in the workplace,' says Link, who does the drawings. 'And we were actually witnessing a lot of that at Loaded. On the face of it, it looked like an actual office. But there were some very odd things going on in there. Office Pest was influenced by that, and was our way of trying to deal with this office we were in.'
Alongside featuring some of their greatest hits, the exhibition includes a 'working prototype' of what these proud ethno-linguists and champions of gutter Anglo-Saxon are calling 'the first ever UK Swear Map, an interactive artwork and growing archive of regional swearing slang', created with actual academics at the University of Sheffield. There is, too, a Photo Booth offering art-goers an instant portrait courtesy of Link’s wonky pen, and a showing for 'a particularly potent section' of the F*ckyeux Tapestry. It’s their crowd-sourced, 103-metre 'cartoon reimagining of the Bayeux Tapestry'. It features, quite possibly, even more phalluses than – in Modern Toss’s uniquely modern worldview – the manky old bit of French cloth that’s about to be unveiled at another art institution across town.
'I'm sure the British Museum are thrilled that we've done a version that audiences can experience for much cheaper than visiting the original,' says Bunnage. 'Which isn't that good! And we've got more jokes in ours.'
And don’t be fooled by the pair’s cartoons’, well, tossed-off aesthetic. 'Writing jokes is really hard sometimes,' sighs Bunnage. 'It looks like it's taken two seconds, which is about how long it takes to read it, but it might have taken us all afternoon. Which is really embarrassing.'
Modern Toss on 21 years of cartoons
Crudités and crudities: isn’t a 21st anniversary exhibition, with a private view and everything, a little “art establishment” and boring for you guys?
Jon Link: Well, it's actually not the 21st anniversary. It’s more like the 22nd or 23rd. So it's quite good already because it's just a lie.
“The stink of excellence in a world gone tits up since 2004.” Would you say that was a good, future-proofed summation – pessimistic but realistic – of the founding Modern Toss ethos?
Mick Bunnage: Yeah. We anticipated when we started that that was going to be the case. So it worked out quite well.
Link: We're playing a long game on that one.
If working at Loaded was your contextual influence, what were you artistic inspirations?
Bunnage: Viz was a big thing. That was a big thing for us and for Loaded. But we wanted to do something totally new: the simplest possible route to getting a laugh. Jon's drawings were so simple. So we just sat in the pub with a bit of paper and a pencil, and did about 10 cartoons straight off. And we were rocking!
Link: One of the things we first started talking about was cartoons, because we were both into them. We shared some old cartoonists that we liked. We both really like Saul Steinberg and James Thurber.
Bunnage: Also Pete[r Cook] and Dud[ley Moore], Jacques Tati films, Mel Calman cartoons, The Ramones, Mike Judge, greetings cards from 1973 and Novelty Rock by Denim.
The rough and ready nature of the drawings, the wonky squiggles of a lot of the characters: is that a fundamental of Modern Toss?
Link: I think it is. A lot of it came from when we were sitting together talking about ideas, and I’d have an A4 sheet of paper, and [the squiggles] would just be written down to remind us of the joke. And that would be it. That would then be scanned. And that would be the finished thing done.
That gives it a real urgency. It feels like it's done at the same time as a joke, which is quite a powerful thing. [Other cartoonists] put a lot of work into drawings. But with jokes, it doesn't necessarily help a lot of the time.
Can you break down, please, the power of the well-deployed swear?
Bunnage: It is tricky because people always think that we're swearing to upset people. And we're not. It's just punctuation, really. You bung it in because it sounds good. But it is dramatic as well. You can elevate the punch of the joke by sticking in some bit of lazy swearing. It's brilliant, works really well. But it is mostly how people that we know talk. And how talk as well.
Link: What we're doing is really stripped-down captions. We do notice it ourselves, if there's too much swearing in. We often do stuff and then go through it, and we call it the “f*ck sensor” – take a few out or move them around a bit. Just to get a balance
The UK Swear Map: what's the importance of getting a proper linguist, the University of Sheffield’s Dr Chris Montgomery, involved with that?
Link: It came out of an earlier exhibition. In Liverpool, it was suggested to us we should do a localised version of the periodic table using Scouse swearwords. So we put this small thing together and people really responded to it.
Then it happened that the next exhibition was in Sheffield, and they have these big university language departments. So we made contact with them and had a chat with Chris. He said it was a really good idea because people think language is becoming the same everywhere. This map proves that it isn't. There are still these pockets of language around the country that people are really proud of.
We just did Portsmouth for the Swear Map. F*cking hell, there's some stuff going on there! It seems like port areas have really strong [language heritage]. The main one there is dinlo: an outsider idiot that's not local to the area. It's not a particularly heavy swearword, but the way they use it improvise it into longer strands of terrible swearwords is just exceptional.
Any other favourite regional swearwords?
Bunnage: Prannet. No one says that anymore. That's just a berk. All that Cockney stuff is sort of gone, innit? People don't use it anymore. But you can actually use any word not as a swearword but as a comedy putdown. Prannet sounds like something technical, doesn't it?
And any personal favourite cartoons from the exhibition?
Bunnage: There’s a bloke staring at the countryside through binoculars. And a fellow says to him: “Birdwatching?” He replies: “No I'm looking for somewhere to dump me fridge.” It looks really good as a massive landscape cartoon. [pause] The reason that we're not stand-up comedians is because we can't tell jokes. So we draw them.
Link: One that sticks in my mind is an early one from about 2004 – a bloke being interviewed in the street by a news person. And they say: “Are you worried about SARS?” And the other bloke just goes: “No I like it. I think it’s good.”
Bunnage: A lot of the early ones were just a bloke selling someone else to fuck off in various permutations.
Link: There’s a mid-period one: a funny-shaped coffin being lowered into another funny-shaped coffin. And the priest is saying: “And so we say our last goodbyes to Dave, buried alongside his wife, who was also a massive Tetris fan.” It's just a nice image. It's quite sophisticated for us.
What is the risk for any punter entering your Photo Booth at the exhibition?
Link: Funny you should say that. I've done a full risk report on it for the gallery. Well, Chat GPT did. There’s really no risk at all. You'll just get a really sh*t drawing at the end. With a stamp on it. Something you can keep forever.
Anger is, as they say, an energy. But when the real world is really very f*cking angry indeed, how do you stay funny?
Bunnage: Essentially, it’s not too hard because we're actually quite calm people. We don't stoke up anger. We just absorb it and stick it back out again. So, the more there is around, the more we neutralise it. We’re like anger blankets.
I'm going to say it's anger asbestos.
Bunnage Yeah, that's good. But that's dangerous, isn't it? You got to get that shipped away by a professional.
How good a living have you made from two decades of been rude, crude and angry?
Bunnage: Terrible! We’d be better of being vets, or doing dentistry.
Link: It's a way of life, really. A slight curse in a way. But what else are you gonna do?
Having an exhibition yeah? — 21 Years of Modern Toss, Drawing Room, Bermondsey, London SE1 5WS, until 6th September 2026. Tickets available at drawingroom.org.uk
