Fairytale cartoon: How to rework a joke

"You wake up after 100 years and the first thing you do is check your phone?"

Sometimes, though not very often, it's possible to write a new caption for a rejected topical cartoon. This one was originally about #wakeupcall selfies.

Remember that craze? I wouldn't be at all surprised if you didn't. It was billed as the new #icebucketchallenge but unlike that craze it seemed to fall out of fashion just as my gag was hitting the desks of cartoon editors. So it was dead on arrival.

However, I decided it could be reworked as a more general joke about the way we use phones and off it went again. It appears in this week's Spectator.

I also removed a "with apologies" from the signature, because although the drawing is clearly based on Disney's Sleeping Beauty, the fairytale is not an exclusively Disney thing and it felt like that was getting in the way of the joke somehow.

It is, of course, yet another cartoon about technology. You can see lots more in my book Cartoons on Demand.

Cartoons and the digital workplace

I was commissioned to draw seven cartoon strips for a company's staff-training programme, on the subject of adjusting to the "digital workplace". Here are two of them.

I've drawn so many cartoons about the technology that is such a part of our lives these days that I found the strips almost wrote themselves. A fun job then, and one that featured the cartoon debut of our cat Mike, above, pictured when he was a kitten.

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Christmas cartoon: Word of the year

"Does my nose look shiny in this selfie?"

Apparently "selfie" was named as the word of the year so there expect to see a few festive twists on it from cartoonists this year. Here's one from the December issue of Saga.

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A place in A Cartoon History

I've got three cartoons in the new coffee table book Private Eye: A Cartoon History, including this lemmings joke from earlier in the year.

It's a thumping great doorstep of a book, so make sure your coffee table is sturdy.

Waterstones took a unique approach to displaying the book, above. I'm fine with the "silly drawings" bit, but Private Eye might question the "pretend newspaper" part, bearing in mind how many genuine news stories they've broken over the years.

Last week I went along to the launch of the book where they got the assembled cartoonists drunk so they could take this photo. I'm in there somewhere. At the centre are the Eye editor Ian Hislop and the cartoonist Nick Newman, who edited the book.

Click to enlarge. Photo © Philippa Gedge

We all wore name badges. Here's mine. Luckily, as a cartoonist I am only known by my first name!

Ten cartoons about Twitter

It occurred to me recently that I have done rather a lot of cartoons about Twitter. Here are ten of them. You can follow me on Twitter: @roystoncartoons

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Private Eye cartoon: Twitter abuse

From the current issue of Private Eye, a cartoon about Twitter abuse, and the site's seeming reluctance to tackle the problem. This one comes with a celebrity endorsement!

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Reader's Digest cartoon: Game on

A captionless cartoon from the May issue of Reader's Digest.

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Private Eye cartoon: Eyes down

Gadget obsession is always a good source of jokes. See more technology-based cartoons here and here.

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Not Yet Sold: Ceiling groovy

"There's an app for that."

One from my rejection pile, which I like to ironically refer to as the "Not Yet Sold" pile. You can see more NYS cartoons here.

Technology cartoon: In another world

"Look at him, with his head in the Cloud."

More technology cartoons.

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Technology cartoons: Silent contemplation

Computers and gadgets are a huge part of our lives these days, so it's no surprise that this is one of the key subjects I seem to draw about now. People spend so much time in silent, heads-down contemplation of their gadgets that cartoons with no captions seem to work well. Here's a small selection.

If you'd like to reuse any of my cartoons on technology, or any other subject, or would like to commission cartoons, get in touch.

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Phone cartoon: Eyes down

"Let us pray."
I've taken the plunge and bought my first smartphone, so now I resemble one of the characters in this cartoon, which was in The Spectator a few months back. I'm sure the novelty will wear off soon and I'll get some feeling back in my neck.

If you look at the web on a mobile phone, then you may like to now that I have now optimised this blog so it looks OK in that format. I say "optimised", this just involved me clicking something once in the Blogger control panel.

Haven't (overtly) plugged my book for a while, which features the above cartoon and lots of others, so I will now. A digital version is available but if you haven't completely embraced the virtual world, like me, you can also buy it in the dead-tree format: Click here for details