Private Eye cartoon: Not exactly topical

I've just got back from a family holiday, during which I was mostly offline, so it was good to go online and find that this cartoon, which was in this week's Private Eye, got a very nice reaction and lots of retweets on Twitter (including here and here).

It was a little surprising as the cartoon refers to a song from 1979 (ask your parents, kids) so it's not exactly topical. But it seems to have tapped into a nostalgia vibe.

UPDATE: The cartoon made it into Pedantry Corner in the most recent Private Eye (13 June):

Being a bit of a pop music pedant myself, I was actually fully aware of this but I thought putting "Pop Musik" would get in the way of the joke, a view backed up on Twitter by someone who knows a bit about comedy.

UPDATE UPDATED: Here's my follow-up letter in this week's Private Eye (27 June):

Errr ... but someone pointed out that I put "Musik" instead of "Muzik" so this could run and run. Hoist by my own pedantry!

Click here to follow @roystoncartoons on Twitter

Technology cartoon: Lightbulb idea

"This never used to happen in the old days."

Anyone who looks in regularly here will have noticed I've been on a bit of a blogging break. In the manner of these things that's probably known as a blogiday or something equally annoying. Anyway, here's a cartoon from last month's Saga magazine.

Click here to buy Royston's cartoon book

Pop culture cartoon: Retromania

"I'm rehashing an old magazine piece about how popular culture keeps revisiting the past."

The idea for this cartoon, which is in the current Private Eye, came while reading an article by Simon Reynolds about his new book Retromania, which is about how 21st century pop culture is endlessly revisiting the past.

I really enjoyed Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again, a study of post-punk and new wave music, so I may well read the new one, but I can't help thinking that the argument is a little spurious. After all, the first music I really got into as a kid was 2-Tone, which was itself a revival of an earlier wave of ska.

So I started to think, "I've heard this argument more than a few times before", which sparked the idea for the cartoon. The cartoon doesn't refer to Reynolds, and that's not supposed to be him, as it's more about the way newspapers and magazines are just as happy to revisit past glories.

Click here to buy Royston's cartoon book