At the new Hastings Cartoon Festival

I took part in the first Hastings & 1066 Country Cartoon Festival on the weekend of October 15 and 16, which was held to coincide with the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings.

Above is my big board cartoon (click to enlarge) created on the Sunday, the Big Festival Day, in a marquee on The Stade, on the seafront. It was fun to draw parallels between events in 1066 and 2016.

On the Saturday I took part in a cartoonists’ panel discussion and Q&A with The Surreal McCoy and Glenn Marshall. We showed our cartoons on a big screen and talked about influences, generating ideas, feedback and, inevitably, rejection.



There was also a festival exhibition in The Stade Hall, with lots of gags on a historical theme. The top one here was recently published in The Spectator.

I designed the festival logo, seen below on a T-shirt. They wanted something about King Harold with the arrow in his eye, so a dip pen seemed the obvious substitute for a cartoon festival. Don't try this at home, kids.

All in all, a great debut for this festival. Let's hope we can do it all again next year.

I wrote a longer report at the PCO blog. And you can visit the festival website at: 1066cartoonfestival.co.uk

History cartoon: The Normans

Every time I turn on the BBC these days they're talking about The Normans, the new history series, so here's "another chance to see", to adopt the current TV euphemism for repeat showings, a Normans cartoon which appeared in Private Eye earlier this year. Click the image to enlarge.

This is one I will almost certainly be showing at my aforementioned talk on cartooning. Have I aforementioned that enough yet?

Royston's portfolio website

History cartoon: 1066 and all that

I had fun doing this cartoon, it's nice to do drawings that are a bit different to regular gag cartoons from time to time. This appears in the new issue of Private Eye. Click to enlarge.

I've never seen the Bayeux Tapestry in real life. I'd love to. After all, it's the original comic strip. I love the way the strip along the bottom tells a parallel story – just like Fat Freddy's Cat in the Freak Bros. comics!

Pedants will know that the Bayeux Tapestry is not actually a tapestry at all, as it's embroidered by hand, not woven. But, of course, I wasn't going to let that get in the way of the joke. Here's the original, for reference. As you can see, I jigged things around a bit to make more room for the lettering and to upset historians.

In other news, my portfolio website is now back online at www.roystonrobertson.co.uk. Not that there's anything new there. Must get round to updating it sometime ...