Bloghorn spotted this great work this week...
One: Dave Brown in the Independent on the Pre-budget Report
Two: Peter Brookes in the Times on the Death of New Labour
Three: Paul Wood in the Spectator: "It's pretty chilly out. Do you want to borrow a scarf?"
The PCO: British cartoon talent
Kate's last piece of advice to any aspiring cartoonist is to "have endless perseverance, draw from the heart and be a shameless self-publicist".
Kate also feels that the internet has opened up many new ways in which cartoonists can now promote themselves. "The digital age also means a lot more choice for us in the way we decide to present our work."
Bloghorn says T for Taylor
The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
PCOer Royston Robertson writes:
The Forbidden Planet blog has a nice piece to mark six months of The DFC, the subscription-only kids' comic launched earlier this year. Instead of canvassing the opinions of grown-up comic fans, they've interviewed a member of the target audience: Molly, nine.
This was interesting to me as my son, who is six, reads The DFC. He loves it, but of course he only knows about it because his cartoonist Dad wanted to see it. His friends are largely unaware of The DFC because it has such a low media profile. It really needs to get into the shops permanently (it's currently on a one-week trial at Tesco).
Like Molly in the FP piece, he also goes for the funny ones rather than the more serious, adventure ones. I think I did much the same thing with comics as a child.
Forbidden Planet blog
The DFC
The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
Cartoon by Andy "Gilby" Gilbert. Click to enlarge
Who's Laughing Now?, a cartoon exhibition by PCOer Andy Gilbert, has been a hit at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery and as a result, selected pieces will be exhibited at the Queen's Hospital, Burton upon Trent, until December 13.
After that, the full exhibition can be seen again at the Brewhouse Arts Centre, Burton, from January 17 until February 21. Opening times are Mon-Sat 10am-5pm
Andy Gilbert produces artwork for Rainbow Cards and much of the exhibition highlights the gentle humour that he produces for their range.
The PCO: British cartoon talent
From France via The Independent newspaper
The same newspaper also has a comprehensive obituary on the late Les Barton
The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
PCOer Martin Rowson writes...
One way and another I've had quite an exciting week. At the Cartoon Awards on Wednesday I got slapped, quite hard, by the celebrated lawyer and serially rebellious Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews, who seems not to have liked an interview I did with him for The Spectator this August. Surprisingly enough, I've never been hit by a politician before, although Peter Brookes used to whack me every time we met. On the basis that all cartoonists, if they're giving it out, should be able to take it as well, I took this particular assault on the chin (actually, more the whole left side of my head) and decided honour was satisfied. Subsequently Bob has offered to buy me lunch, so maybe it isn't over yet.Bloghorn says click R for Rowson
The other exciting thing is the extraordinary viral life of a feature I illustrated for New Humanist, devised by the comedian Christina Martin. It's called "God Trumps" and is a series of playing cards depicting representatives of 12 of the World's leading religions, with marks out of ten in six categories whereby they might trump the other religions (Muslims trump everyone, needless to say, because of the impossibility of making jokes about them). As of Thursday evening, it had, apparently, had over 55,000 hits (as compared to just the one I got from Marshall-Andrews), and the atheistical boys and girls at New Humanist are so excited that, at their non-Christmas party on Thursday night, there was a lot of talk of T-shirts and tea towels and another 12 cards to mop up the religions we left out, like Russian Orthodox and Mormons. With luck this one could run even longer than my feud with the member for Medway! Yippee!
UPDATED: Tuesday 25th November. More news on readership from the New Humanist magazine blog
Bloghorn spotted this great work this week...
One: Peter Brookes in the Times on the BNP list
Two: Tim Sanders in The Independent on "I'm a Celebrity..."
Three: Dave Walker at the Church Times Blog on pubs becoming churches
The PCO: British cartoon talent
Bloghorn asked our Artist of the Month, Kate Taylor, how she started out in drawing;
Since childhood Kate loved to draw and only ever wanted to be an illustrator. She has always worked as a self-employed freelancer, but, with her output always "veering towards" cartooning.
She always admired the cartoons of the late Mel Calman but tells us she tries not "to look at other people's work too much, because everyone else seems so funny."
Bloghorn says click T for Taylor
The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
The Cartoon Art Trust Awards were presented last night at The Mall Galleries in London. The trust, which runs the Cartoon Museum in London, has presented the awards annually since 1995. Gag cartoonist Grizelda, left, was among the winners.
PCOer and Private Eye regular Will "Wilbur" Dawbarn was there and sent Bloghorn this personal report:
I was fortunate enough to be invited to join the Private Eye table this year, and what a star-studded occasion it seemed to this small-town boy! I even got my suit out of mothballs for the occasion.
After a brief time spent standing around with no-one to talk to, trying to earwig Ken Clarke's conversation (for cartoon research purposes of course), scoffing as many canapés as I could get my hands on, and examining some marvellous Giles originals, I soon fell in with the coterie of Eye cartoonists, particularly the garrulous Simon Pearsall ("First Drafts"), who chatted non-stop in my left ear (most entertainingly) during the meal, leaving me only dimly aware of cartoons being auctioned off for thousands of pounds and awards being dished out to the worthy.
In my right ear at the table was Mark Warren, the writer of the Celeb strip. It turns out it's only Charles Peattie who does both Alex and Celeb – I'd always assumed it was the same writer-artist combo doing both.
I missed a few more awards whilst outside having a fag with Simon P. and Martin Rowson (who was very charming and gracious to the winner of the Under 18 Young Cartoonist of the Year award, telling her to email him for advice and the like – though he bluntly refused me the same courtesy when I enquired ...)
The Award Winners
Joke cartoon award: Grizelda of the New Statesman and others
Strip cartoon award: Stephen Collins of the Times
Pocket cartoon award: Jeremy Banks aka “Banx” of the FT
Caricature award: Nicola Jennings of the Guardian
Political cartoon award: Nicholas Garland of the Daily Telegraph
Young cartoonists of the year: Emilia Franklin (under 18) and James Hood (under 30).
The Pont prize for drawing the British Character: Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor of the Daily Telegraph for Alex. The Pont Award was set up five years ago in memory of Graham "Pont" Laidler, whose drew the brilliant series The British Character in Punch in the 1930s and 40s.
Lifetime achievement award: Raymond Briggs. The creator of the acclaimed books The Snowman and When the Wind Blows was responsible for some of the earliest British “graphic novels” – long before the term or the form was generally known. Previous winners of the award have included, Ronald Searle, Gerald Scarfe, Fluck and Law, and Trog.
PCOer Morten Morland has a first person report here as does Christian Adams of the Telegraph has his take on the events here too and Down the Tubes also has a round up.
The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
PCOer Nathan Ariss reports that the Queen's English Society is launching a book which he has illustrated.
The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
The Chris Beetles Gallery in London is currently hosting a show entitled The Illustrators 2008 .
The annual show features work by illustrators and cartoonists, such as Quentin Blake, left, from 1800 to the present day. It runs until January 3.
The gallery says that the exhibition, which features more than 1,000 pictures, is the world’s largest selection of original illustrative artwork for sale. Accompanying the exhibition will be a 140-page catalogue which contains biographies, notes and 342 illustrations. It is priced £15. The Chris Beetles Gallery is at 8 & 10 Ryder St, St James's, London. Telephone: 020-7839 7551.
The website can be found at chrisbeetles.com
The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
Following on from our piece about the Comica convention this coming weekend, it has come to Bloghorn's attention that the V&A is offering UK-based comic artists a programme of six-month residencies. Budding graphic novelists have until the the 4th January 2009 to apply for one of the four places, which include bursaries and studio space.
The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
Prince Charles is 60 years old today - Steve Bell, one of the cartoonists at The Guardian, offers a present.
The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
Every cartoonist has a distinctive personal working style and Bloghorn asked Kate what works for her;
"I produce rough ideas with a biro, then the final artwork with an ink pen, scanning that in to the computer, then having a bit of a tinker with it in Photoshop. If I'm working to a very tight deadline, fear helps the creative process along. Otherwise I spend a lot of time eating, hoovering, wandering about the house with no real purpose, and surfing the internet. All this is done under the guise of 'looking for inspiration'."
The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
It's a US Elections Comedown Special this week...
One: Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury strip in The Guardian on withdrawal symptoms
Two: Gerald Scarfe in the Sunday Times on sweeping up
Three: Liza Donnelly in the New Yorker on the woe of winning
The PCO: British cartoon talent
If you're into comics then you'll be spoiled for choice this weekend. For northerners there's Thoughtbubble, the Leeds Sequential Art Festival, running from 13th to the 16th November, which includes a one-day comic convention at Saviles Hall and Alea Casino, both on Royal Armories Square, Leeds.
And, for those down south there's Comica, the London International Comics Festival, featuring exhibitions along with a symposium on Archetypes v Stereotypes In Comics & Graphic Novels. The symposium is at the Victoria and Albert Museum on 14th November, and there are loads of other exhibitions and events at the Institute of Contemporary Arts from the 14th to the 26th November.
UPDATED: 17th Nov 2008
A report on Thoughtbubble from Shug
The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
Twenty Americans by Saul Steinberg, from Illuminations
An exhibition entitled Saul Steinberg: Illuminations is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London from November 26 until February 15.
It features a retrospective collection of more than 100 works by the Romanian-born American cartoonist whose work was a major part of the New Yorker magazine for six decades, a period in which he drew more than 1,200 covers and editorial illustrations.
The exhibition covers the whole range of his work, from high art to low, from murals to magazines and from caricature to cartography.
The Dulwich Picture Gallery
The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
Cartoonist and PCO member Adrian PCOer Adrian Teal shares one of his highlights of 2008;
As the shadows lengthen, the nights draw in, and Cumbrian fell-walkers are forced to use sheep as rudimentary buoyancy aids, I find myself looking back over the dog-days of 2008 with a sentimental eye, and specifically at the highlight of my year.
I send a lot of sample stuff in the post, on spec, to various people outside the world of newspapers and mags, and more often than not, it ends up in the secretarial bin. However, once in a while, it generates some interest. Back in April, I got a call from the producer of the BBC’s QI, who also produced Not the Nine O’Clock News, Blackadder, and Spitting Image, where I had met him a few times when I was an irritating ten year-old.
He asked me to produce the front/back cover for the new QI Annual (available from all good bookshops, 6th November), and would I mind awfully doing a couple of double-page-spreads for the inside too?
This was a moment of pure, unbridled, cynicism-free joy for me, since the comedy stable from which he and his contemporaries come helped to shape the sense of humour of my generation. They are also very nice people, which makes a huge difference in this trade, believe me, and I was given pretty much a free rein to do what I thought would suit. I couldn’t believe my luck.
And they paid my invoice inside two days. Pinch me, someone.
The time difference between the UK and the USA meant that newspapers here were unable to report the victory of Barack Obama the day after the election. So British cartoonists had another day to gather their thoughts, and we saw the results yesterday.
Two cartoonists noted a certain messianic quality in the President Elect. Peter Brookes in The Times came up with a saintly Obama and Matt in the Daily Telegraph wondered if he could work miracles.
Andy Davey in The Sun saw the election as a new dawn and Paul Thomas in the Daily Express also looked at the notion of new hope for America.
A celebratory tone was notable. Steve Bell in The Guardian depicted a slam-dunking Obama and Dave Brown in The Independent showed his ballooning popularity.
Mac in the Daily Mail had Obama beating racism, to make it to the White House while Matt Buck at Channel 4 News noted how that famous address is changed for ever. Nicholas Garland in The Telegraph took an interesting sideways slant, with a quote from Martin Luther King.
Alex Hughes in Tribune looked ahead to the huge challenges faced by the new President and Patrick Blower, on his Livedraw site, had an animated take on this weight of expectation.
It will be fascinating, of course, to see how cartoonists will react once Obama is doing the job of President, when the news stories are not all positive.
Have you seen any other great Obama cartoons in the UK media? Let us know via Comments below
The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
Bloghorn's featured Artist of the Month for November is cartoonist and illustrator, Kate Taylor.
Yorkshire-based Kate's work has appeared worldwide in books and magazines for a wide variety of clients. Like many cartoonists, her work appears in many markets. Her clients include Sainsburys, Yorkshire Electricity, Honda, BBC, The Daily Mirror, The Sunday Times, Exley Publications and Pearson Education.
We will be publishing examples of Kate's work here every Friday in November.
Bloghorn says click T for Taylor
The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
This cartoon courtesy of the Cartoon Museum, the University of Kent and the trustees of the Giles collection.
Bloghorn interviews Nick Hiley, curator of the exhibition Giles: One of the Family which is now on at the Cartoon Museum in central London.
Who had the original idea for a Giles retrospective?
As soon as the Giles collection arrived at the British Cartoon Archive in 2005 it was clear that we needed to celebrate with a London exhibition, and the Cartoon Museum was the most appropriate place to hold it. We have spent the last eighteen months cataloguing and digitising Giles' enormous collection of artwork, correspondence, and ephemera. This exhibition puts on display some of the things we have found.How long has it taken to put the Giles exhibition together?
In a sense it has taken five years, as it was in 2003 that we began looking at the possibility of giving the Giles collection a permanent home in Canterbury, and making it accessible to the public and to researchers. The collection was in storage for ten years after Giles' death in 1995, and it was always our aim to make the artwork available for exhibition and display once it reached the British Cartoon Archive. The actual exhibition planning and selection, and the writing of the catalogue, took about six months.How did the University of Kent get involved?
We've been interested in the Giles collection for a long time. The University's cartoon archive was set up in 1973, and after Giles' death in 1995 the archivist approached the Cartoon Trustees, to whom Giles left his collection, with the suggestion that his artwork should come to Kent. At the time they had hopes that the collection might remain in East Anglia, where Giles lived and worked, but when we approached them again they were happy to donate the collection to us. A second exhibition – "Giles: Drawn to Suffolk" – is opening in Ipswich on November 8, and we do hope that a permanent display of Giles material may one day be established in Ipswich, where he had a studio for many years.What does promoting the work of a cartoonist who has died achieve?
I hope that it brings the enjoyment of his work to new audiences, and gives existing fans a new insight into how he worked, by displaying his original artwork. Giles' correspondence does include letters from other cartoonists and illustrators, expressing admiration for the way that he could arrange complex scenes in a simple visual way, so I hope that present-day cartoonists can learn something from seeing his work. He could draw cartoons of the Family where there is action across the whole frame, or on different floors of the house, but the focus is never lost.What would Giles have seen if he was watching the last-minute preparations for the show?
He would probably have laughed a lot, and grumbled a lot as well. He would laugh because we reconstructed his studio, using all the easels, paints, pencils, etc. which came with the collection, even down to his glasses and his cardigan on the back of his chair. I'm sure he would tell us we had got it all in the wrong place! He would undoubtedly grumble, because he never liked his original artwork, partly because he was a perfectionist and partly because he regarded the printed cartoon as the finished work. His originals were drawn for reduction, and he thought that by comparison with the printed version they looked as if they had been "drawn with an umbrella"! They don't seem like that to me, but to show that they are part of a reproductive process we have used specially made frames that show the whole artwork, including Giles' notes and the blockmaker's scribbles in the margins.Visit the Cartoon Museum
Original artwork by Carl Giles. Click to enlarge
The exhibition Giles: One of the Family opens today (November 5) at the Cartoon Museum in London. It showcases the work of Carl Giles (1916-1995), the most famous cartoonist of his generation.
Born in Islington, London, during the First World War, Giles joined the Daily Express in 1943 where he would create his quintessentially British "Giles Family". For many people his cartoons capture British life in microcosm. Giles was voted Britain’s Favourite Cartoonist of the 20th century in a 2000 poll.
In 2005 – ten years after his death – the complete Giles collection passed to the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent. The material in the exhibition is drawn entirely from the 6,000 original drawings (dating from the 1940s to the 1990s), 1,500 prints, tens of thousands of letters, documents, films and ephemera together with the contents of his studio held at the Archive.
For more information on the Giles Collection or the British Cartoon Archive go to: www.cartoons.ac.uk
A catalogue of the exhibition published by the British Cartoon Archive is available for £25.
The Cartoon Museum, Little Russell Street, London, is open: Tues-Sat, 10.30am-5.30pm and Sun 12pm-5.30pm. Admission: Adults £4, Concessions £3, Free to Under 18s and students.
The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
PCOer Martin Rowson writes:
Basically, it's a bugger, and quite often you have you make a virtue of necessity by saying you don't know (the result). So in 2000 I did a cartoon for The Scotsman, drawn on the day of the election, to be published on the Wednesday, saying that Ralph Nader had won. Then again, in 2004, in a cartoon appearing the day before the US election, I just launched into fantasy, second guessing the outcome (click the picture for details). After all, we're in the business of comedy and fantasy, so you should, with a little bit of guidance to the readers, be able to get away with anything! Just like the Republicans!This cartoon first appeared in the Guardian during the 2004 US Presidential election campaign.
We've seen how they covered the recent Democratic and Republican Conventions, but as the USA goes to the polls today, how do cartoonists cover an election?
Probably the most controversial approach is that being taken by Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury (seen here in the Guardian) - to draw the artwork for Wednesday's strip in advance and in essence 'call the election', in this case for Obama - an approach not without it's dangers, as dealt with here by Cincinnati.com's Jim Borgman.
Of course, in these days of blogging, it's now possible for a cartoonist to live-blog their drawings, like Marshall Ramsey in the Mississippi Clarion Ledger or the Politicker.com's Rob Tornoe. The Daily Cartoonist's Alan Gardener will be live-blogging the live-bloggers as the results come in tonight as well.
The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
