Magazine cartoon: Spud you like

"Can you take your feet of the seat, please sir?"

A cartoon from the October edition of The Oldie.

More train cartoons. More Mr Potatohead cartoons.

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Cartoons about Lego

"I hope there's no product placement in this."

This cartoon about The Lego Movie can be seen in the current Private Eye. And here are a couple of older Lego cartoons. 

"I must say I'm not convinced by Lego Jenga."

I heard the Lego Jenga line on QI on BBC Two the other day, but I can assure you I didn't steal it from there. I stole it from my son. And talking of stealing, the one below never sold, which is a shame as I thought it was a nice visual gag.

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Not Yet Sold: Office cartoon

"You were the last person I expected to fall down on the job, Trubshaw."

Here's another rejected cartoon for you. I liked this gag, but perhaps the reference to the Weebles toys was lost on anyone who wasn't brought up in the 1970s like me.

Click the link for more Not Yet Sold cartoons.

This gag has actually been given an airing, albeit in a non-earning fashion, as it appears in the latest edition of the Foghorn, the magazine of the Professional Cartoonists' Organisation.

You can read an archive of the Foghorn online, just click the button on the right-hand column of this blog (scroll down). To buy a print subscription to the mag, which comes out six times a year, go here.

Still hanging around: Volcanic ash cartoon

OK, enough politics* already, there's another story in the news that doesn't seem to be going away.

I thought this cartoon on the volcanic ash cloud, which I drew for a local paper a few weeks ago, would have a limited shelf life, but the infamous plume appears to still be with us. So I thought I'd give it another airing here.

And it seems there is still life in the "smokers' huddle" cartoon too, one of the great contemporary clichés of UK cartooning!

(*I spent Election Night with a group of other cartoonists at the Groucho Club in London. You can read a short report on this at the Bloghorn)

Buy back your childhood with eBay!

Actually don’t bother, because there’s always someone willing to pay more than you for worthless but fondly remembered tat. Anyway you get enough of a nostalgic rush if you just go window shopping, which is what I was doing when I typed “ventriloquist dummy” into an eBay search and came up with these two bizarre toys, both of which I owned as a child.


The character on the left I knew as Mr Paliarchin. He was a popular, mass-produced dummy in the Seventies. I believe it was marketed as Parlanchin, or something similar, but he was Paliarchin to me. I must have read the box incorrectly. You might think it odd, to look at him, but I was very fond of Mr P. He was a close companion for several years, much to the annoyance of my family. My uncle got so fed-up with Mr P’s comedy shtick one Christmas that he ran off with the wee plastic fella. Mr P was later found hanged from the light-switch cord in the bathroom. These days I could probably sue for emotional trauma.

The guy on the right was called Hugo. He was not a ventriloquist's dummy at all; his eyes and mouth remained stubbornly immobile. The point of Hugo was that you stuck disguises on him and hideous scars and wounds. Except of course that you were a child so you stuck them on yourself instead, and Hugo became the world’s most useless ventriloquist doll.

The thing is, looking at these slightly scary looking characters now, I’m amazed that I turned out so normal and well balanced. And it gets worse: I also had a ventriloquist doll based on Frankenstein’s Monster. No, really. But it seems that today’s models are no less scary. Witness the George W. Bush dummy:


For a while as a child I thought I would be a professional ventriloquist when I grew up. How absurd an ambition was that? Now cartoonist, that’s much more realistic …