Self-caricature by Mark Nesbitt, aka Luke Warm
Mark Nesbitt is an Irish cartoonist and caricaturist who has worked under the pen name Luke Warm since 1990.
His cartoons were first published in the Sunday Tribune in 1981, and he was joint winner of a competition in the Guardian in 1985 with a cartoon about the famine in Ethiopia and Sudan. From 1990 to 1992, as Luke Warm, he had a regular cartoon, "Fence Sittin'", in the Botswana newspaper Mmegi. He moved to London in August 1992, and has since had his cartoons published in the Financial Times, The Irish Times, The Sunday Business Post, The Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Times Higher Education Supplement, the Independent, the Independent on Sunday, the London Evening Standard, the Financial News, the New Statesman, Scallywag, Third Sector, Magill, Business & Finance and The Phoenix. His finance and office-based comic strip, "Punters", was syndicated by the Press Association for two years. Another strip about internet trading, Net Head, ran in the Financial Times from 1999-2000.
In 1995-1996 he was sponsored by the Midland Independent Newspaper Group to take a Cartoon MA at the University of Central England, in which he gained a Distinction. His study into the censorship of cartoons formed the basis of Index on Censorship's cartoon site, and he was involved in setting up The Great Challenge international cartoon exhibition in London in 1998.
Since 2003 he has lived in Devon and mostly drawing studio caricatures and on-the-spot caricatures as well as working on an as-yet-unpublished new strip, Back to the Drawing Board, about global issues since 9-11. His first children's picture book 'The Toy that Got Away' was published by MacMillan in 2000 and since then he's provided illustrations over 10 other books including several textbooks for Oxford University Press. He now also draws his popular Conference Cartoons for virtual Zoom events from his studio.
