Bloghorn spotted this great work this week...
One: Kipper Williams in the Spectator on unpleasant aircraft problems
Two: Daley in The Daily Telegraph on Barack Obama
Three: Morten Morland in The Times on
the end of the Olympics
It's British cartoon talent
Here is the last interview answer from Andy Davey our PCO Artist of the Month for August 2008.
Bloghorn asked him what's the future for cartooning in the digital age?
I’m sure cartoons will thrive and flourish, after they emerge from this difficult period, but in what form they will do this, I have no idea. It may be that animation will provide the extra selling point they seem to need in the rush to digital. It seems many people under 30 now think of animated cartoon art when they hear the word “cartoon”, so the deed may be already be done.
It’s increasingly difficult to get any kind of still, newsprint cartoon published at a reasonable fee, so it may have become less attractive to new entrants and this may lead to a downward spiral in the quality of work. But there are, still, good new people coming in*.
Interestingly, the route to being a cartoonist is usually circuitous or tangential; there aren’t any really useful training schools. This means it still attracts lateral thinkers, oddballs and eccentrics – thank goodness. Long may it do so. Satire and drawn humour are as natural (and enduring) as camel farts. The art-form might mutate but it won’t die.
Can I go now?
Bloghorn says click D for Davey.
* See some of it at this link British cartoon talent
Bloghorn spotted this great work this week...
One: Kipper Williams in the Spectator on unpleasant aircraft problems
Two: Daley in The Daily Telegraph on Barack Obama
Three: Morten Morland in The Times on
the end of the Olympics
It's British cartoon talent
It's something all cartoonists dread: you open up a magazine and see one of your precious works in print but they have done something to it.
It may be a changed caption, an amended drawing, the cartoon has been printed too small ... whatever, it's a bit annoying. Here, cartoonist and blogger Mike Lynch takes a US magazine to task for printing captions over the drawing!
Talking of presentation, it's a no-brainer for a department store to turn to a local celebrity when looking to publicise the opening of a new branch. So hats off to Harvey Nicks for their choice when opening a store in Bristol:
Don't they look lovely? The BBC News website has the story
The PCO: British cartoon talent
Breaking News on Bloghorn...
The PCO team for this year's London Big Draw event is confirmed. Team skipper, Pete Dredge (Private Eye regular) will be leading Robert Duncan (Not particularly orange cards), Kipper Williams (The Guardian) and Royston Robertson (Prospect, Readers Digest, Private Eye) into the suitably absurd Battle of the Cartoonists.
The 12 feet long, two-hour epic PCO banner from 2007, hung up, or out, to dry.
You can find details and a report from Bill Stott on the 2007 event here.
PCO members will also be running workshops throughout the day, featuring the many coloured skills of Tim Harries, Chichi Parish, Matt Buck, Andy Davey and Paul Hardman among others.
We will be publishing more details in the run up to the big day on Saturday 18 October.
It's British cartoon talent
Bloghorn spotted this great work this week...
One: Holland in the Oldie on Playing Health and Safety
Two:
Matt of the Telegraph on the GCSE results
Three:
Peter Schrank of The Independent on Russian bears
British cartoon talent
Andy Davey is the PCO Artist of the Month for August 2008.
Bloghorn asked Andy some questions about what he does.
Which other cartoonists' work do you admire?
Gerald Scarfe’s loose, carefree line, devastating caricature and command of so many styles is still pretty breathtaking. Steve Bell’s ability to nail a politician and produce the definitive image of the hapless soul (Major, Blair, Bush) is unparalleled. Matt’s ability to translate world events into demotic scenes of suburbia. Then there are the others – Robert Crumb for his weird Freudian cathartics. Thelwell for pretty much the opposite. Ken Reid, Tony Husband, Ray Lowry, Ralph Steadman, Larry, Ed McLachlan, Posy Simmonds … oh, and that Bill Stott fellow. There are many others. Anyone who makes me laugh out loud gets a special gold star.
Do you have any tips for wannabe cartoonists?
Oh bejayzus. At present, it looks like it would be recommending someone to train as a cordwainer or a wheelwright. Of course, there are several dozen scribblers making a good living out of it – and even cartoon Forbes-listers (Messrs Bell, Pritchett, Scarfe) but the rest of us live on hope, rejection and frozen peas. BUT, if you love doing something, then you just can’t stop yourself pursuing it – and it would be foolish to do so (as I have demonstrated to myself). So if that’s what you enjoy – DO IT, fer gawd’s sake, or you’ll regret it. Worry about the penury later – when the skinny-dog and pennywhistle combo begins to look like an upward career move.
Bloghorn says click D for Davey.
British cartoon talent
The cartoonist Gerald Scarfe is touring the UK with his show Scarfe On The Road. It comes to the Shrewsbury Music Hall on the 4th of September
Scarfe is one of Britain’s most popular caricaturists and is political cartoonist for the Sunday Times. For more details on this illustrated talk, which spans his 40-year career, see the above flyer (click to enlarge). You can book tickets here.
Shrewsbury is no stranger to cartooning as every April it hosts the Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival, the foremost event of its kind in the country.
The PCO: British cartoon talent
Ever wondered why some newspaper cartoons have so many symbols and badges in them? Let PCOer Martin Rowson explain a little about it in this Radio 4 interview about the symbolism of Russia as a giant bear. Clip from the Today programme.
British cartoon talent
Bloghorn spotted this great work this week...
One:
Jack Ziegler in the New Yorker - on superpowered rivalry.
Two:
Mike Turner in the Spectator - ‘What’s up with you? Never seen anyone enjoying themselves before?’
Three:
Steve Bell in The Guardian on the UK's North-South divide
British cartoon talent
Andy Davey is the PCO Artist of the Month for August 2008.
Bloghorn asked him how he makes his cartoons.
I draw with small pieces of broken china, dug up from the garden, while listening to Bach fugues on the wireless. Well, that’s not strictly true. I use pen and ink too … in fact, almost anything which will make a wet and awkward mark really (excluding live crocodiles).
I have tried computers, but I’ve reverted to the wet sensuous stuff – lovely large sheets of fat white watercolour paper, ink as black as jet, the rich wonderful unpredictable colours of Messrs Windsor and Newton, toothbrushes, nibs, blots, smells and mess – it’s wonderful. I’ve been working larger and larger lately – untroubled by the trivial annoyances of deadlines … or payment. I love the free sweep of a nib across virgin Imperial sized paper. It’s a bugger to scan though, even with an A3 scanner. I’m sure I’m going the wrong way here – everybody tells me the way forward is digital, digital, digital – including you, Mr Bloghorn – but you’re all wrong, I tell you – do you see? – Wrong! Ha ha ha (at this point, Mr Davey was heavily sedated under restraint).
Bloghorn says click D for Davey
It's British cartoon talent
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Bored with the Beijing Olympics already? Don't worry, there's always the Cartoonists' Olympics.
At least there is in the mind of the New Yorker cartoonist Mick Stevens. He imagines what the 2008 Magazine Cartoonists' Olympic Games would be like on his aptly named blog I really should be drawing.
Events include: The Reject-Toss (see above) in which contestants toss crumpled-up balls of paper containing unsuccessful ideas across a large room, attempting to hit a small wastebasket on the other side; and Drawing-Table Tennis, which involves two cartoonists batting ideas back and forth across a drawing table until the ideas become completely unrecognizable and devoid of humour.
Any cartoonists wishing to take part in these Olympics, please note: caffeine is a banned substance.
The PCO: British cartoon talent
PCOer Morten Morland writes for Bloghorn:
I was going to write a post on cartooning during what journalists call the silly season. It would have been about trying to perform when most meaningful politicians are on holiday and the papers are full of exclusives such as “Brendan from Bradford can blow bubbles with his bum”.
I intended to begin with the useful opening: “Spare a thought for...” – and follow up with desperate descriptions of life inside a non-airconditoned studio while the rest of the world enjoys barbecue and beer in the paddling pool across the road.
I would go on to curse the party leaders for taking holidays despite knowing full well that cartoonists can’t work with the obscure backbenchers they leave behind.
I would wail about editors who demand that cartoonists continue to produce biting political satire, whilst allowing other commentators to meditate repeatedly on swimming trunks in the post-Blair era.
I was going to write all of that and more, but I won’t, or, rather, I can't.
Because as if by magic a couple of weeks ago, Foreign Secretary David Miliband suddenly cried “LOOK AT ME!” in the Guardian newspaper. He held a grinning press conference and went on an autograph-signing walkabout with the press in tow. The blessed Prime Minister, who mercifully had chosen to take a good ol’ British seaside holiday, with all its rich, stereotypical visual language, was near-fatally wounded.
Then that pier burned down, giving us another day and a half of metaphorical meat. SATs results were published – incredibly badly. The credit crunch rolled on, house prices fell, the stock market slowed and Alistair Darling hinted haplessly at future bribes for voters.
Beijing is currently hosting the Olympics under the slogan, Faster Imprisonment, Stronger Punishment and Higher Pollution – giving us all weeks of material about human rights abuse, protests and smog. And to top it all, Russian Prime Minister Putin and his little president have just found an excuse to start a war in Georgia.
And through it all, it's raining. Cold rain.
Silly season? Absolutely. Brilliantly silly if you’re a cartoonist.
But spare a thought for everyone else ...
Ed: You can see some of Morten's silly season work for The Times newspaper here.
It's British cartoon talent
As we drift into the sometimes quieter backwaters of the summer news season, here's a few cartoons that caught Bloghorn's eye this week.
One:
Dave Brown on lip-reading, from the Independent
Two:
Pete Dredge on the continuing effect of the smoking ban, from the Spectator
Three:
Christian Adams on yawning dogs, from the Telegraph
As previously mentioned, if you've seen a cartoon in the last seven days or so that you think deserves a bit of attention, please pop a link to it into the comments below.
It's British cartoon talent
Andy Davey is the PCO Artist of the Month for August 2008.
Andy's cartoons and caricatures have appeared in UK publications including The Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Independent on Sunday, Private Eye, The Spectator, The New Statesman and Prospect. He has wielded his pen for TV too, drawing for the animated satirical cartoon series 2DTV and covering occasional political news events on Channel Five TV News and Sky TV News.
Bloghorn asked him a few questions, starting with a predictable one: What made you become a cartoonist?
First, I’m very embarrassed you asked me, because it’ll look like nepotism (Andy is the chairpersonman of the PCO, which runs Bloghorn - Ed). However, since you’re holding a water-pistol to my head …
The Voice from within made me do it, m’Lud. Hoarse from years of unacknowledged yelling, it shouted from atop a small grassy knoll somewhere in my gullet. It was only when someone asked me what all the shouting was that I took notice. Ah yes; the little noisy chap within.
He’d wanted to be a cartoonist from the age of about eight, seduced by an imagined life where ties were not essential but getting up late and being rather louche were absolutely expected. Although he didn’t know what louche meant. He wanted to draw characters from the pages of Wham! and Beano comics all day, essentially – with short breaks for football on the park – and saw a career in cartooning to represent just that.
My dour, rational self wilfully ignored such fancies and went about the long, long dreary task of establishing a deeply mediocre career in something hard, unrewarding and smelly (research chemistry). But the Voice kept shouting, letting up only while the usual unhealthy distractions of adolescence and early adulthood kept my mind off … well, anything really. Finally, I gave in – albeit far too late to build anything other than the career I have now.
Bloghorn says click D for Davey.
British cartoon talent
It's great to see that the BBC has come up with a very striking animated film to promote the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, which get under way this week.
The characters, adapted from the Monkey stories, are designed by Jamie Hewlett, and the music is by Damon Albarn, his partner in the animated pop group Gorillaz. Monkey and his pals will be the face of the BBC's Olympics coverage.
The BBC Sport website has a gallery on the the making of the trailer and you can see more on the BBC Blast site.
The PCO: British cartoon talent
Amid the coverage of the London launch of the Beano and Dandy Birthday Bash last week at the Cartoon Museum, we should mention that there's a parallel exhibition in the Beano and Dandy's home town of Dundee. The exhibition is being held at the Lamb Gallery at the University of Dundee until the 20th September, Monday to Friday 9.30-20.30, Sat 9.30-12.00, and best of all, it's free to enter!
More details at the University of Dundee's website. Not being able to attend ourselves, Bloghorn would be keen to hear any reports from the exhibition.
Getting back to the London event, ITN sent a reporter along to cover the event last week, and here's their report.
Thanks to Lew Stringer for his Blimey! It's another blog about comics for the above links.
UPDATED:
PCO member Steve Bright, who worked for the comics for more than twenty years, asks us to point out that ITN have made a clanger in their copy. The current editor of The Beano is Alan Digby, not Rigby. Independent Television News, what can you say ... thanks for pointing that out Steve.
It's British cartoon talent
Bloghorn is giving Artist of the Month a week off this Friday but we will be back with a new featured cartoonist next Friday. In the meantime, have a look back at the talent we have already featured over the past year.
It's British cartoon talent
Bloghorn is launching a new regular feature today: Cartoon Pick of the Week. This does exactly what it says on the metaphorical tin. We shall be highlighting what the folk at the PCO think are the top three drawings and jokes we've seen during each working week. If you have a submission you think we should have seen – but have missed – pop a URL link in the comments underneath this post. The list won't be exhaustive or even always comprised of just our members, but it will be funny. So, Bloghorn hopes you enjoy our list for the week ending 1st August 2008.
One:
Morten Morland on David Miliband. Full cartoon in The Times
Two:
Grizelda on cutting CO2 emissions. Published in Private Eye
Three:
Paul Thomas on beach holidays. Published in The Express
British cartoon talent
