Steven William Maclean Bell (born 1951) is an English political cartoonist, whose work has appeared in a number of publications, notably The Guardian from 1981 to 2023.

[2] While still teaching, Bell did unpaid work providing the magazine Birmingham Broadside with illustrations, including a comic strip featuring Maxwell the Mutant who changed into someone different every time he drank a pint of mild.

Bell followed his lead, and some contacts, and despite rejections including being turned down for The Beano he persevered and obtained paid work for part of 1978 with the comic strip Dick Doobie the Back to Front Man for Whoopee!.

[1][3] When the premiership of Margaret Thatcher began in May 1979, Time Out's news editor Duncan Campbell invited Bell to meet the need for a comic strip on the new government.

[1] Bell's parodies include Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (in an editorial cartoon about the UK Independence Party);[7] William Hogarth's The Gate of Calais about the ban on UK meat exports following outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease and bovine BSE; and – before the 2005 United Kingdom general election when it briefly seemed as if the Liberal Democrats might seriously threaten the Labour Party – J. M. W. Turner's The Fighting Temeraire, in which a chirpy Charles Kennedy as tug-boat towed a grotesque and dilapidated Tony Blair to be broken up.

During the November 2012 Israel/Gaza conflict The Guardian published a cartoon by Bell showing the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a puppeteer controlling William Hague and Blair.

The wording referred to a quotation attributed to Sir Arnold Bax, who said a Scottish friend had told him: "You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing.

[18] In June 2020, Home Secretary Priti Patel, while listing her experiences of racism in the House of Commons, mentioned a cartoon of Bell's published in The Guardian of being portrayed as "a fat cow with a ring through its nose, something that was not only racist but offensive, both culturally and religiously".

For some time he had been in talks with editor-in-chief Katharine Viner about reducing his workload, and "Sadly this probably spells the end for the 'If…' strip after 39 and a half years, which I enjoy doing immensely, but is a hell of a lot of work for an old codger like me, particularly in full colour.

This followed a cartoon Bell produced within the context of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war featuring Netanyahu, with his shirt open, wearing boxing gloves and holding a scalpel over a dotted shape of the Gaza Strip on his stomach.