Life imitating cartoons

Here is a case of life imitating cartoons. Exhibit A: a gag published in Private Eye in 1998 ...


Exhibit B: A kids' animated film from 2008 which is about to hit a multiplex near you ...


OK, it's not a Disney film, and the focus is on Frankenstein's assistant, rather than the evil genius himself ... but still, it's a cuddly kids' comedy about creating a monster. I came up with the idea for the cartoon because I couldn't believe that they'd done a "Disneyfied" version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and I just thought, What will they do next? But even at the time I remember thinking that the idea of doing a kids' version of Frankenstein was probably not that far fetched. Turns out, I was right.

Here's another case of life imitating cartoons. I saw this on a cartoonists' internet forum this week (thanks to Simon Lake). Click the image to read it:


I was compelled to point out that I was killing much-loved cartoon characters 20 years ago! Along with a group of friends I used to run a self-published "adult" comic called DoodleBug in the late 1980s. With scant regard for the copyright laws, we had a regular feature called "Kill the Cartoon Character of Your Choice", which involved readers suggesting characters that they'd like to see dispatched. We would then oblige.

As a result, we had Garfield shot, Scooby Doo beheaded, Snoopy hanged, and Popeye beaten to a bloody pulp (after someone swapped his spinach for a tin of spaghetti hoops). It was all very juvenile, of course, but then we were juveniles. Well, almost. I was 19 when we started the comic. Here's one of the strips, which sees everyone's favourite cute canary meet his maker ...


Again you'll need to click the above image to read it. The similarity between the image of Sylvester the cat in my cartoon and in the Jimmy Cauty painting is incredible ... though I'm not alleging anything other than coincidence I should add.

Of course, the moral here is that if I had thought "art gallery" for these cartoons, rather than self-published comic, and if I'd written the script for a kids version of Frankenstein rather than doing that one-off gag, I'd probably be a lot richer than I am now.

Royston's portfolio website

From the archives: Early "fame"

I came across these cuttings while having a sort out the other day. The first two are from nearly 20 years ago when some friends and I ran a self-published Viz-inspired comic called DoodleBug.

We sent copies out to various media outlets, most of whom ignored us. We did get a mention on the John Peel Show though and, for some reason, five glowing reviews (not bad as we only did eight issues!) in the now defunct Record Mirror. These are the last two. Click to enlarge and read the text.



The cutting below, worth posting for the dodgy hair and glasses, is from 1994. Universal Post was a magazine for students in Sunderland. It was independent, not connected to the university, and was my first regular paying gig. For a couple of years I did a strip every fortnight (A4, landscape, two decks) and they paid me £20 for it. Not a great deal of money even then, but I put it all into a separate bank account and eventually it paid for a holiday abroad.

I submitted some of the strips in a competition for student cartoonists run by Zit comic, to which this article refers. Click to enlarge and read the text.



Check out the "comedy" pose and me pretending to draw a strip I'd finished ages ago! By the way I didn't come second, there was only one winner and everyone else was a runner up. I think the paper decided second sounded better. The bit about me being drunk is a scurrilous lie.

Royston's portfolio website

Religion and cartoons

I once had a bit of a run-in with the religious powers-that-be over a cartoon strip. But unlike those Danish cartoonists, most of whom acted like callow youths eager only to provoke and cause offence, I actually was a callow youth eager to provoke and cause offence. Well, that’s my excuse anyway.

It was the late 1980s when Viz was all the rage and there were many imitators, – including me and a group of friends. We ran a self-published fanzine-style comic called DoodleBug. We were talking one day about the cartoons we saw as kids that always featured a central character who had some kind of magic skill or gadget and would go around trying to help people, though it would usually backfire on him – think “Danny’s Tranny” in Topper, or “Pete’s Pockets” in Whizzer and Chips.

This kind of character had already been parodied to death by Viz and others, but we decided there was one person who fitted the blueprint perfectly: Jesus. At this point those who do have deeply held faith should maybe stop reading!

So we came up with a script, drawn by me, in which Jesus is the ultimate cartoon character. He encounters people with problems – no wine for a wedding, a man with no food for him and his 4,999 pals, leprosy ... you get the idea. “Jesus soon discovered that with his miracle-performing skills, almighty amusement and miraculous mirth is never far away,” we wrote. As a seasoned reader of the strips it was based on will know, they often end in punishment for the main character. In our strip it was not the slipper from Dad but – forgive me dear reader, I was only 21 at the time – crucifixion.

The strip ran in DoodleBug, which we distributed ourselves and had a circulation of about 1,000, with not a whisper of complaint. But when I started at university later in the year, and the strip was reprinted in the rag mag, it was a different story. The college chaplain wrote a letter to the students’ newspaper in which he said that the strip “could only have been devised by those who are contemptuous of the Christian religion”. I remember gulping when I read “the authors must stand accused of an attack which is on par with ‘racial’ attacks. I am reminded of the mocking cartoons with which the Nazis represented the Hebrew religion”.

The president of the university’s Christian Union also wrote a letter. She quoted from the Bible and implied that we were all going to hell.

I’ll be honest, at the time I thought the notoriety was great. The cartoon had succeeded in provoking. As a lapsed Catholic (and former altar boy!) I had wanted to mock, to take the mickey out of something that seemed to me like a lot of nonsense.

Seventeen years on, I look at it with a slightly more mature eye. I must admit, the strip still makes me chuckle, in the same way Monty Python’s Life of Brian does. I’m still a non-believer (or “heathen”, as my mum used to put it) but I’m not sure I’d do the strip again. Reading the letters of complaint now, I see now that the authors were genuinely upset. And I regret that. It was only supposed to be a laugh!

Anyway, luckily it was only Christianity that we picked on. They may have been strongly worded letters, and we may have been compared to Nazis, but at no point did anyone say, “We will accept nothing less than beheading for the perpetrators”.