Herne Bay Cartoon Festival 2022

Any idiot can be prime minister: Here's me with my seaside peep board on Herne Bay Pier at the weekend. The Tory leadership contest rumbles on but this might still be relevant next year, the tenth anniversary of the Herne Bay Cartoon Festival, if we end up with another general election.

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Setting sail for the Herne Bay Cartoon Festival

I drew the poster for this year's Herne Bay Cartoon Festival. Click to enlarge. You'll need to, I packed a lot of jokes into it. Some of them are even not about Covid.

The main festival exhibition is now up at Beach Creative, I've got a few cartoons in there. Some of them are even not about Covid. And there's a Giles exhibition at the Seaside Museum. The live event takes place on the Pier this Sunday (August 1).

You'll find all the details you need over at the Procartoonists.org blog.

Brexit and fake news at Herne Bay Cartoon Festival

Pic: Kerry Riley

Here's me -- suppressing that moment of panic when faced by a huge blank board -- at the Herne Bay Cartoon Festival, which I helped organise, on Sunday 6 August.

I filled the board with Brexit-based gags as seen in Private Eye and New Statesman. Here's a few of them.

Bearing in mind the result of the EU referendum, I assume my efforts were only appreciated by 48 per cent of the audience (probably less as Herne Bay is a bit Ukippy). Some people certainly remained stony-faced.

But it wasn't all biting political satire. As the event was held on the Pier for the first time all the cartoonists got to go on the merry-go-round at the same time. Here's me blowing my own trumpet* with Rich Skipworth and Des Buckley.

Pic: Zoom Rockman

*It's not mine it's Des's. And it's a bugle.

I co-curated the main festival exhibition at Beach Creative gallery, which was full of top-notch stuff, as ever. Lots of cartoons on fake news and Donald Trump. Here's a couple of mine.

Cartoonist Glenn Marshall put together a "fringe" show Mona Lisa: Not Happy, consisting of parodies of the famous painting in cartoons and other art forms. Here's one of my contributions, a foray into Photoshop art.

There was the usual stuff you get at a festival: cartoonists drinking, playing ukulele etc. but I'll spare you the pics. All in all, another cracking  Herne Bay festival.

I wrote a fuller report, with lots of pictures, for the Procartoonists blog which you can read here.

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Herne Bay Cartoon Festival 2016

Here are a couple of my cartoons from the exhibition Postcards from the Seaside, part of this year's Herne Bay Cartoon Festival, in which many of the cartoons were modern takes on traditional seaside postcards, many in the style of Donald McGill, the acknowledged master of the genre.

The cartoon above refers to McGill's notorious, much-prosecuted postcard "A Stick of Rock, Cock?", below.

 
As usual there was a live event in the Bandstand on Herne Bay seafront, where there was much drawing of cartoons. Photo by Kasia Kowalska.


Here are a couple drawn on the shared boards (i.e. with lots of other cartoonists) during the afternoon. It's always nice to hear laughter for cartoons that have previously been rejected by several magazines, as these two have. Clearly this was an audience of great wit and taste ...


"Did you know you may be entitled to PPI compensation?"

"Ah, summer! The sun! The long nights! The annual Labour leadership campaign!"

I put together a photo report on the event which you can see at the Professional Cartoonists' Organisation blog.

Herne Bay Cartoon Festival 2015

Having helped organise the Herne Bay Cartoon Festival on 2 August, and having put together articles for the Procartoonists blog and the Cartoonists' Club magazine about it, I thought I should probably put something on my own blog before the month is out.

The photo above by Gerard Wyman, in which I'm contributing to one of the "communal" boards, sums up the day for me: I'm wearing a silly hat to keep off the sun and sitting on the ground, knackered after an exhausting but hugely fun day. There's a lot more on the aforementioned Procartoonists blog, but here are a few other Herne Bay bits and pieces.

There were many cartoons about nuisance seagulls -- as they have been in the news recently and this was a seaside cartoon festival -- here's one of my contributions. Pic by Karol Steele.

This photo by Kasia Kowalska was taken at the opening of the Martin Honeysett exhibition. I mentioned to Tim Harries that we look like the worst ever blues duo, so he made this. 

I'm not sure that it would be easy listening, to be honest.

Talking of easy listening ... here's a cartoon from the main festival exhibition. Yes, I am a ukulele player but I do understand that the ubiquity of ukuleles these days is, er, not appreciated by everyone.

Cuttings from the Herne Bay Gazette. Click to enlarge and read

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