Private Eye cartoon: Easily distracted

Technology continues to inspire as the dominant subject matter in my cartoons these days. This is from the current Private Eye, a joke about the Steve Jobs film. No, not that one.

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Spectator cartoon: Masked humour

I drew this months ago but coincidentally it appears in print (in the current Spectator magazine) in the same week that I saw a film screened live in a cinema for the first time.

The joke is a dig at your typical noisy mulitplex customer, but they're unlikely to be seen at a play so in fact it was very enjoyable (it's just the old cartoonist cynicism at work again). We saw the National Theatre Live screening of The Audience, with Helen Mirren. Of course, it'll never match the experience of the real thing, but if you can't make it/afford it, it's the next best thing. Sadly, during the performance we saw she did not berate any gay drummers.

Here's another "theatre masks" cartoon from a couple of years ago.

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Not Yet Sold: At the cinema

Time for another in my occasional series of rejected cartoons. (Not that my cartoons are only occasionally rejected, you understand ...)

This was inspired by my six-year-old daughter who, largely to wind me up I think, likes to scoop up popcorn off the floor at the end of a film and shove it into her mouth, while saying, in a Homer Simpson-style voice, "Mmm ... floor popcorn."

You can see more Not Yet Sold cartoons here.

Cinema cartoon: Film fun

"Wow! That's probably the best Kyrgyzstani neo-realist horror-comedy crossover I've seen so far this year."

The job of a cartoonist is to poke fun, and that can apply even when the subject is something you actually like.

This accompanies an article in Isle magazine about two local film clubs. I'm a fully paid-up member of one, the Thanet Film Society, and regularly attend its screenings at the Palace cinema here in Broadstairs.

They actually did show a Kyrgyzstani film recently. It wasn't a horror-comedy crossover though. I'm eternally grateful to them for bringing films that barely get shown anywhere to our corner of Kent, and I hope they'll forgive this spot of piss-taking. Just doin' my job.

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Film cartoon: All rise

I haven't yet seen Rotpota, as the cool kids call it, but I intend to. I'm a fan of the original and I hope that the new one will finally eradicate the appalling Tim Burton "re-imagining" from my memory. This cartoon can be seen in this week's edition of The Spectator.

Here's another cartoon on an "Ascent of Man" riff.

Books cartoon: Thinking about inking

The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo

You may have seen quite a few cartoons around which play on Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Cartoonists often riff off each other's ideas to come up with new jokes, and certain themes take hold. This cartoon can be seen in the October issue of Reader's Digest.

If you saw my Ramsgate Arts festival talk last month, you'll have got a sneak preview of this. You lucky people.

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