Reader's Digest cartoon: Spud-based mirth

I've got a cartoon in the May issue of Reader's Digest in the US:

This gag was initially sent out to several UK magazines, but was rejected. In those days, it looked like this:


I had to change the "British bobby", of course. I went for a more generic TV cop show style detective. I also thought that "assailant" seemed like a very British policespeak sort of word. They may well use it in the States but I thought I was on safer ground with "attacker". It's never straightforward sending gags to the US. You have to constantly think about whether certain words/concepts will be understood in the same way. As someone once said, we're two nations divided by a common language. And it goes way beyond lift and elevator.

(By the way, talking of British bobbies, if you've not seen Hot Fuzz yet: drop everything and go now. It's just hilarious.)

You'll notice also that as it was such a prestigious client I decided to do a bit more picture research on Mr Potatohead, to make him more accurate. It's not the first time said character has appeared in a cartoon of mine. This is from a few years ago:


Hey look: there's an interview with yours truly over at the excellent Chewing Pencils cartooning blog. Matt Glover, who runs the site, says: "This week’s feature artist surely has the coolest name any artist could hope for!" I must say, this is news to me, and seems a little unlikely, but I'll gladly accept the compliment. Thanks, Matt!

Cartoon festival fun

I wrote here a little while back about attending the Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival, and being nervous about doing one of the 6ft by 8ft "big boards" there. Well, the festival was last weekend and was terrific fun, and the board went pretty well. So my cartoon comfort zone was extended a little bit.

I was worrying too much because I was thinking of it as some huge work of art, rather than what it was: a really big cartoon! Once I looked at it like that it became less daunting. The cartoon I picked was one that was in Reader's Digest last year. I re-drew it to scale, at 6in by 8in:



Then I added a grid of 1in squares so I could easily scale up the drawing to a grid of 1ft squares:



And here's the end result:


Artwork-wise, I felt that I couldn't really compete with some of the other cartoonists there – many of the best artists in the business. Some of their boards really were works of art. I'm not sure how I managed to get the lettering on the signs so off centre! Still, not bad for a first attempt. The important thing, for me, was that the cartoon got lots of laughs from members of the public. And what was particularly heartening was the number of people who said they recognised the kinds of characters and the scenario in the cartoon. Obviously that's what I was aiming at with this cartoon. I also sold the original drawing, which was a bonus!

It wasn't all work, work, work though. The festival is a key social event for cartoonists and so there was plenty of drinking, singing and scrawling cartoons on paper tablecloths. I'm the glassy-eyed fool in the checked shirt ...


Clockwise from bottom-left: John Roberts, Gerard "Ger" Whyman, Clive Goddard, Alex Hughes, Me, Will "wiLbur" Dawbarn, Ian Baker and Jed Pascoe.


Left to right: Nikki Harries, guitar maestro Tim Harries and me (playing egg-shaker percussion, with some considerable skill ...)

Thanks to Clive Goddard for these two pics. And thanks to the organisers of the Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival for putting on such a fantastic event.

Cartoonists' newsletter: My other job

I don’t blog here as often as I’d like to because a) obviously I spend quite a lot of time thinking up and drawing cartoons and b) a fair amount of my spare time is taken up with being editor of The Jester, the newsletter of the Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain.

I took this pic for the club’s recent Members’ Directory, it shows a year's worth of issues, from April last year to March (there’s no January issue).

With remarkable restraint, only one of the covers is by me. The rest are by Alex Noel Watson (two covers), Terry Bave, Matt Buck, Clive Collins, Tim Harries, Louis Hellman, the late Jack Kirkbride, Ian Ellery, and Dave Parker.

I get paid to edit The Jester, but it’s not very much. I do enjoy doing it though. I was a journalist for 10 years, many of them as a sub-editor, at the Press Association, Daily Mirror and The Times. While I enjoyed the job a lot of the time, I would often find myself working with subject matter in which I had absolutely zero interest. Here I have a whole magazine on my favourite subject: cartooning!

Insert eggs-cruciating pun here

Sometimes when you have a really silly idea, you have to see it through. Last week my wife suggested that my 14-year-old nephew may be too old for Easter eggs. I joked, “Nah, just get him one of those Cadbury’s Queens of the Stone Age eggs.” (Like most 14-year-olds he likes his heavy rock/metal. ) At that point I knew I had to do this …

I was pleased with the way the band’s "sperm and egg" logo could be used for the window to the Easter egg!

And let’s not forget that all-important health warning on the back …

The best part is that for a split second, he fell for it.

Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival: Making an exhibition of myself

I'll be attending the Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival in a few weeks (April 20-22). I went along to the festival last year but was not an official participant. This year I am, which rather scarily means I have to draw a cartoon on an 8ft by 6ft board in the market square!

It also means I've got some cartoons in the "Mind Your Own Business" exhibition there, which opens at the Bear Steps Gallery on Tuesday (April 3). I submitted four pieces – two signed colour prints and two black and white originals. Three of the four cartoons have been previously published, but I thought I'd throw in a favourite of mine that has done the rounds of just about all the magazines I can think of but has not yet been published ... (I find that term so much more positive than "unpublished" or "rejected"!)

Dead blogs

You see so many blogs these days that appear to be dormant, but have you any idea exactly how many there are? The Guardian has a figure: two hundred million!

Why are so many people blogging off?

Private Eye cartoon: Queue here

This gag is in the current edition of Private Eye. I thought it up while waiting in a slow-moving queue at the bank. It wasn't me doing the tutting or sighing, you understand, I was busy scribbling this down in an A6 notebook that I carry around with me:

Down-time well spent, I'm sure you'll agree! Cartoons often come from real life situations, of course, so it can be problematic when you work at home on your own because you don't connect with the world enough. You have to get out from time to time, to observe people and what they are saying and doing. Even if it is being annoying in a queue.

The modern morgue

It used to be recommended that cartoonists keep a morgue, that is a file of pictures and photos that you may need for reference in the future (as opposed to a cold storage room for dead bodies, that would be weird). I always had a problem with this because, well, where do you start? You could put aside a picture of a tractor but you may never need it. Then when you find you need a picture of a rickshaw you realise you neglected to put one in your morgue. So I was never very good at it.

But now the whole idea is redundant as we have the gift to cartoonists that is Google Image Search. Now you can get 100 rickshaws of all different types from many angles. Today I had to draw a cartoon involving peregrine falcons and a cathedral. I shudder to think how long that would have taken before Image Search. It probably would have involved a trip to the library. Or a bird sanctuary. So hats off to Google, on behalf of lazy cartoonists everywhere!

Oldie magazine cartoon: Released from limbo

Sometimes a magazine will accept a cartoon but then hang on to it for a long time before using it. This one is in the current issue of The Oldie, but they've had it for almost a year.

It was actually drawn in January 2006, with a Rotring technical pen. It's almost a year since I switched to brush pens, so although it's good to finally see this in print, I much prefer the brush-pen line.

The gag is, of course, a variation on the "wise guru" theme, one of the cartoon cliches that have been around for years, along with desert island gags and "take me to your leader" aliens. It's always a good idea to come up with new, fresh themes for cartoons, but it doesn't do any harm to knock out the odd variation on a well-worn theme!

Adaptation

This week I watched the Oscar-nominated film Little Miss Sunshine on DVD. Enjoyable though it was, it veered greatly from the book. What happened to our heroine's encounter with Mr Chatterbox in the High Street? And at no point in the book is there any mention of a gay, suicidal Proust professor.

I heartily recommend Roger Hargreaves' classic, by the way. I read it in one sitting.

Business magazine cartoon: A splash of colour

I recently started doing a regular cartoon for a business magazine. Normally I submit roughs in black and white, even if the finished version will be in colour, but because this was the first one for the mag I added some colour to two of the characters to give the client an idea of what the end result would look like. The editor thought that having limited colour made it more striking, so that is how the finished artwork (below) appeared, as will all of their cartoons. I must admit, it wouldn't have occured to me to do it that way but I think it looks pretty good. Plus, of course, the customer is always right and it makes the job a lot quicker to do!

Getting the cartoon idea straight away

It's rare as a cartoonist to come up with the right idea straight away. Normally there's lots of scribbling and frustration. But it does happen. I was asked to draw a cartoon to accompany a newspaper story about a prison with an excellent recycling record. Being a cartoonist, the very first thing I thought about was a convict's suit with arrows on it. Which led immediately to this:



Note: the number on his suit is today's date!

Star Wars cartoon: A correction of sorts

OK, I just looked at my files after my earlier post (maybe I should've done it before ...) and found that I actually sold another gag to Maxim from that same batch, ten years ago. I can't believe I forgot that with my first-ever magazine cartoon sale they took TWO gags ... I still get overjoyed when that happens! Anyway, this was the other one and of the two cartoons it appeared first, in the May 1997 issue of Maxim.

Actually, this is a re-draw. I gave the original away to one of my Star Wars fan friends. I've done a number of Star Wars gags over the years, look.

Back then Maxim paid £60 per gag, by the way. Believe it or not, there are some magazines publishing cartoons in 2007 that don't pay that much.

Political cartoon: Ten Years On

Happy New Year, folks. 2007 is significant for me as it marks ten years in magazine cartooning. Obviously, like most cartoonists I've been drawing since I was a kid and cartooning has always been there, but it was at the beginning of 1997 that I made a new year's resolution to regularly submit gags to magazines such as Private Eye, Punch etc ... one of the few resolutions I've ever kept.

A few months into the year, I made my first sale to Maxim magazine (UK). It was about the rise of New Labour (well, kind of) who came to power in May. The Conservative Party's scare-tactic advertising slogan was, you may remember, "New Labour, new danger".

This appeared in the June 1997 issue of Maxim. The magazine has since dumped cartoons, to free up more space for naked women.


Of course, the cartoon looks pretty strange to me now, especially the character on the left. It was submitted as a photocopy of the drawing, so there's none of the touching-up in Photoshop that I would do now. Also, there was no Google Image Search then, so the New Seekers were drawn from memory! I just did an image search a moment ago, and there is not a beard to be seen. I think I may have confused them with Peter, Paul and Mary ...

Merry Christmas

And a Happy New Year to you all.


For some reason, most of the Santas I've drawn this year have been grumpy or slightly dodgy. Next year, if you need a moody Father Christmas, I'm your man.

Cartoon legend Joseph Barbera dies at 95

Here's the story at the BBC

"Cartoon legend" is no overstatement. Hanna-Barbera cartoons were loved by kids of many generations. I will give my "Hanna-Barbera: Tunes From The Tunes" CD a spin in tribute! (They're all on there ... Top Cat, Yogi Bear, Flintsones, Wacky Races, Hair Bear Bunch, Hong Kong Phooey, Scooby Doo, Banana Splits ...)

William Hanna and Joseph Barbera are so linked with these Saturday morning cartoons from the 1950s onwards that the fact that they created Tom and Jerry back in the 1940s is sometimes overlooked. That's quite a body of work!

Here's a very old cartoon of mine, by way of a "tribute". This appeared in the now-defunct Saturday "Metro" section of The Times back in about 1998.

Can't go wrong with a penguin cartoon

Here's a Christmas cartoon for you. Except, well, it wasn't really intended as a Christmas cartoon at all. It was sold to Reader's Digest back in June and they held on to it for the current issue because, I suppose, snow=Christmas. I remember colouring this at the height of the summer heatwave and I swear it made me feel cooler in my stuffy attic room.

Last week I attended a Christmas bash held by Reader's Digest in London. I was a bit under the weather and tragically I had to forego the free booze and canapes in favour of mineral water! But it was great to catch up with some cartooning pals, and chat to a few I hadn't met before. It is written that when two or three are gathered in the name of cartooning, they shall moan and complain about the business. So there was a fair bit of that, but in a good natured way. Probably because of the free booze.

Christmas cartoons: It gets earlier every year

Christmas starts early for cartoonists. I have been doing festive cartoons and company Christmas cards (excerpts below) for some time now. Not complaining, keeps me busy. But I reckon I can now draw Father Christmas, Rudolph and the elves in my sleep.

Art vs Blogs

I'm a fan of Eddie Campbell, the comic-book artist best known for illustrating the graphic novel From Hell. His autobiographical comics are great, particularly How to Be An Artist (which features the priceless opening line "How to sucessfully be an artist - not to be confused with becoming a successful artist ...)

Anyway, he has now joined the "blogosphere", as people insist on calling it, with The Fate of the Artist. A blog in which the author appears as himself. His only concern is that he will now put into his blog what he once put into one-page diary strips. Let's hope that doesn't happen. Thanks to Linkmachinego, as ever.

Newspaper cartoon: Smashing fun

This week's local paper story was about a school holding a competition to build robots out of Lego. An innocuous enough story, but one that allowed me to have some fun. There's more than a little Simpsons and Futurama influence at work here!