In praise of gag cartoons

Here's an article I wrote for the Procartoonists blog five years ago, when I published my first collection of cartoons:

Whenever the media spotlight is turned on cartoons it is often those of a political variety. These cartoons shout the loudest and have news impact, but I think it's time to speak up for its modest cousin: the gag cartoon.

I have been drawing gag cartoons for the magazine market for about 15 years. I love the process of coming up with new ideas and, hopefully, getting them published.

Recently I've been sifting through my drawings from magazines such as Reader's Digest and Private Eye in order to put together a book collection. I'm not friends with any famous people so I had to write my own foreword for the book and decided to to put down exactly what it is I like so much about gag cartoons as a medium.

This was the crux of piece: "The single-panel joke is a perfect, self-contained unit of comedy, an instant hit of humour that doesn't demand much of your time."

I once heard the writer Will Self describe gags as "the haiku of cartoons". That may sound a little pretentious (from Will Self? Surely not?) but I think it's true, a gag cartoon is like a poem. Or a one-liner joke, perhaps. It is a small, carefully crafted article.

It doesn't have the grandeur or the, let's be honest, occasional self-importance of the political cartoon, but it is still designed to provoke a reaction: hopefully laughter.

I have heard some people claim that the gag cartoon is in some way an old-fashioned form. This is probably because it is so closely connected with magazines, so people think of crumpled, yellowing copies of Punch in the dentist's waiting room. Also, magazines and newspapers are "dead-tree technology", and that, we are constantly being told, is on the way out.

But, when you think about it, the gag cartoon is actually perfectly suited for this age of the short attention span and sits just as easily on a web page, or an iPad app, as a magazine page.

And long may it continue to do so.

Click here to buy Royston's cartoon books

Cartoonists victorious on TV's Eggheads

The Cartoonists on Eggheads, l-r, Alex Hughes, Royston Robertson, Robert Duncan, Graham Fowell and Martin Rowson

If you have yet to watch the show on BBC iPlayer and don't want to know the result, look away now: yay we WON!!!

And pretty convincingly too, becoming the first team to knock out each Egghead in the head-to-head rounds and then go on to win the show. Kevin Ashman, the last Egghead standing, who finally fell on a question about cartoons, if you can believe it, said it was "the most comprehensive defeat we've ever had". I like that quote.

To celebrate here's a rare shot of me smiling on the show (most of the time my face was in a grimace caused by sheer nerves!)


We all drew cartoons and caricatures of the Eggheads beforehand, which we revealed on the show. I drew CJ de Mooi as a Bond villain as that is the type of "Mr Nasty" character he likes to project! He got the joke, luckily, and really liked it. I only found out via a recent episode of Eggheads that he considers himself something of an expert on Bond films, so that was fortuitous.


Over at the Bloghorn there's another more detailed account of the Eggheads experience by team captain Alex Hughes: Cartoonists crack Eggheads Can I just say "Yay!" one more time?

Royston's portfolio website

Another cartoonist called Royston: Update

When I found out last week that there was another cartoonist called Royston, working in Australia in the 1940s, I knew I would need to uncover more about my namesake.

After numerous emails to cartoonists in the UK and Australia, primarily John Jensen and Lindsay Foyle, consultations in reference books on artists, and a fair bit of poking around in dusty corners of the internet, I found out a lot more. And here’s the headline news: Royston was a woman!

“Royston” was the pen-name of Victoria Ethel Cowdroy, better known as Vic Cowdroy, an Australian cartoonist, painter, sculptor, illustrator, filmmaker and commercial artist. I feel like a bit of an underachiever compared to this Royston.


A poster I found in an online auction, credited as the work of Vic Cowdroy, circa 1965. Intriguingly, it is signed “Royston Cooper”.

Cowdroy was born in 1908 and moved to London after the Second World War. She married cartoonist Arthur Horner, creator of the strip Colonel Pewter. They lived and worked in Britain until the mid-1970s when they returned to Melbourne. She died on 26 June 1994.


From The Age, Melbourne, Dec 31, 1977. Note the reference to Horner working on a Colonel Pewter film with his wife.

You can find out all you need to know about Vic Cowdroy here. The article states: “From January 1938 Cowdroy contributed numerous joke cartoons and elegant line and watercolour drawings to Man, Man Junior, Cavalcade and other semi-salacious publications under the pseudonym ‘Royston’.”

I couldn’t find any more "Royston" cartoons online (if you have any, please do scan them and send them to me) but this piece does contain some very entertaining transcriptions of her Man cartoons, which were more than a little risqué for the time.

Old woman to young woman going out: “Be a good girl and have a good time.”/ “Make up your mind mother.” November 1938

Young woman to customs officer checking her luggage: "Oh, don't worry with that one. It's only some marihuana I'm smuggling in." December 1938

Woman with knickers round her ankles but hat intact: “Huh! I thought you said this stuff would knock your hat off.” January 1939

So, lots of information uncovered on Victoria Cowdroy, but one mystery remains: Why earth did she chose the name Royston?!

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Many thanks to cartoonist John Jensen for being the first to tip me off that "Royston" was a woman. John's father was Jack Gibson, one of the key artists at Man, and John met Vic Cowdroy a few times.

Thanks also and to Lindsay Foyle in Australia for a heroic amount of research, finding out info from colleagues and looking Cowdroy up in reference books on Australian art. And cheers to Matt Buck, Andy Davey, Jason Chatfield and Nik Scott.

And this is me! THIS Royston's portfolio site

Another cartoonist called Royston

"Great gosh! My husband! Then who the devil's this?"

Yes, unlikely though it sounds, it appears there was once another cartoonist called Royston. And with a signature eerily close to mine! These were emailed to me be Denise Miles, from Sydney, Australia (click to enlarge).

Denise found them in the 1941 annual for Man magazine, a saucy periodical published by Land newspapers in Australia.


"I presume you know the story of the commercial traveller and the farmer's daughter. Well I'm the farmer's daughter ..."

If you know anything about this Royston (the name is more common as a surname, so that may be the case here) let me know in the comments section below, or send me an email. My theory is that in the future I invent a time machine, go back to the 1940s and illicitly sign a bunch of contemporary cartoons, before sending them off to magazines which I hope won't notice.

Hopefully, someone else will be able to provide more plausible information. Look at the similarity of the signature to mine though. I'm officially freaked out.

Denise tells me that the Man annual has a cover price of two shillings and contains many cartoons by Royston, alongside some beautiful old advertisements for Australian companies, an ad for war savings certificates and another telling its wartime readership to "Speak no rumour, hear no rumour".

Other cartoons in the book are signed "Such", "Barnes Amos" and, possibly, "Gibson". There are also cartoons by someone whose signature is a flower.

Let me know if you can provide more info. Now, I'm going back to the shed to work on that time machine ...

Royston's portfolio website