Derek Bauer (47), left, whose savage cartoons elevated the tone of The Weekly Mail for many years, died at the weekend in a car crash near Kleinmond on his way to deliver presents to friends. An artist who worked with ad agencies, he joined the Mail six weeks after its launch in 1985. “He gave a new visual sophistication to the paper,” said former co-editor Irwin Manoim.”He was an unusually fine draughtsman and had a kind of subversive style he was, for those days, quite scurrilous.” Bauer was never a political animal he was an artist first but there were cartoons even the Mail couldn’t use, and cartoons some thought the Mail shouldn’t have used like his classic sketch of a springbok buggering a kangaroo after a surprise cricket Test victory for South Africa (it ran on page one, now a collector’s item). In 1994, by which time he was also contributing cartoons to the Cape Argus and Saturday Star, he left political cartooning entirely to concentrate on his burgeoning business Tourvest’s Tigers Eye, owners of Derek Bauer shops, for which he designed items ranging from T-shirts to mouse pads. He also designed wine labels, and at the time of his death, he was planning a new career as a wine farmer in Grabouw.