Let us have faith in cartoons ...

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.

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

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