The Bloghorn is the digital cartoon blog of the UK Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation

Coming soon: John Jensen writes for Bloghorn about ideas, wit versus humour, and the international language of cartoon competitions. Watch this space.

John Jensen rugby illustration © Punch Ltd

Bloghorn’s featured Artist of the Month for February 2010 is cartoonist Robert Duncan.  He specialises in cartoons for advertising and his client list includes many well-known companies. He was one-fifth of the recent winning team of cartoonists on  the Eggheads TV quiz and hs comedy play Cluedo holds the all-time box office record at the Theatre Royal Windsor. His book, A Rum Do is a bestseller in Barbados (but nowhere else). He estimates he has produced over 3000 greetings card designs in a  long and varied career.

But what caused him to take up the noble art of cartooning in the first place?

I became a cartoonist because I was hopeless at sport at school, and funny drawings kept me out of trouble. I was always fascinated by the fact that you could draw a single frame and tell an entire story. It struck me as a great way to earn a living, because you would get better at it all the time, and retirement would not be an option…

This is the first of four posts from Robert during the next month. You can check out our artist of the month archives here.

American cartoonist Dave Coverly in live action. Hat tip to cartoonist Mark Anderson for the link.

The 2008 winning entry from Mikhail Zlatkovsky

Entries are being sought for the 2010 International Political Cartoon Competition. The biennial competition is run by the Ken Sprague Fund, which was set up to commemorate the life and work of Ken Sprague, who died in 2004.

John Green, organiser of the competition told Bloghorn:

This year’s biennial Ken Sprague International Political Cartoon Competition is titled, ironically, Money Makes the World go Round. We are asking cartoonists to respond to this assertion in the way cartoonists can do best: mock it, take it apart, undermine it, sabotage it, question it and deflate it with their pens and brushes. We had such an enormous response to the last competition on Climate change and global warming, revealing an astounding quality of ideas and cartooning panache. We hope this year will see a similar high standard on a subject that affects us all. This year’s competition is co-sponsored by the North Devon Appledore Arts Festival and a selection of the best cartoons will be exhibited there.

Prizes wll be awarded for first, second and third, along with a special ‘emerging artist’ award for 16-22 year olds. The deadline for submissions is the 1st May 2010.

It looks as if a criminal legal case will be brought against the artist who made the ‘Hope’ poster of Barack Obama (below). The New York Times reports Shepherd Fairey is now facing both a civil and a criminal case for his representation of, or from, an original Associated Press photograph which became famous during Obama’s successful presidential campaign. Shepard’s response to the news of the likely criminal case is here.

Traditional animation: Disney’s The Princess and the Frog

You may have read about the new Disney film The Princess and the Frog, which is out this week. What you may also have read is that it is “a return to hand-drawn animation”.

Bloghorn would like to dispute this by pointing out a simple fact: cartoons drawn digitally are still hand drawn.

The tools may have changed, but it takes as much creativity and drawing skill to create a cartoon digitally as it does using pen and paper. Pixar Animation Studios did not create such awe-inspiring digital films as Toy Story and Up by hitting a key or clicking a mouse.

The Princess and the Frog is, rather, a return to traditional methods of animation, and it’s good too see that these can co-exist alongside digital.

What’s notable is that Disney’s first 2D animated film in five years appears now that Walt Disney Animation Studios is being run by John Lasseter, the creative force behind Pixar and a man who knows that it’s not the tools you use that matter, it’s the ideas and creativity.

Or, as Bob Mankoff, Cartoon Editor of the New Yorker, once put it: “It’s not the ink, it’s the think.”

Bloghorn notices that when political cartoonists pick the same targets, they often pick the same jokes, or at least variations on a similar theme.

This can be seen in the national press today as three heavyweight cartoonists give their take on Lord Goldsmith appearing before the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war.

One: Peter Brookes in The Times suggests he was leant on

Two: Steve Bell in The Guardian thinks pressure was applied

Three: Dave Brown in The Independent on suggests arm-twisting

Of course, all these cartoonists are working at the same time, operating under the same time pressures – there’s no suggestion of copying! – which makes it all the more a fascinating insight into the way cartoonists’ minds work. Thanks to Andy Davey for drawing it to our attention.

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The Only Joking! exhibition, a collection of gag cartoons old and new, opened at the Cartoon Museum in London today (Jan 27).

The show is designed to raise spirits in the deep winter with a few much-needed hearty chuckles, though when PCOer Martin Honeysett attended the private view yesterday he found that many people were clearly at home nursing winter colds (like this Bloghorn writer!)

Martin said: “I suppose the sparcity of cartoonists in the pub beforehand should have indicated the smallness of the throng attending. Never mind, all the better to get a good view of the fine work on display, extolling the virtues of this form of comic art and the lack of current appreciation.

“It’s a nice mix of old and new and an opportunity to see some gems from the museum collection. Well worth a visit.”

So, sup up your Lemsip (other cold remedies are available) and get down to the Cartoon Museum in Little Russell Street before the exhibition ends on March 1. For more details visit the website.

Detail from Norwich, created for Ottakar’s bookshops by Chris Burke

PCOer Chris Burke is guest speaker at the Brighton Illustrators Group meeting on 28th January. His talk takes place at the Eagle pub, 125 Gloucester Rd, at 8pm. Chris tells us what he has planned:

I’ll be taking an illustrated canter through 25 years of doodling. I’ll start by explaining why I gave up a perfectly good job as an art director in advertising. I swapped what Orwell called “rattling a stick in a bucket of swill” for the gilded life of a pencil squeezer.

I shall lightly glide over the following year which I spent in Penury (for you non-Londoners that’s between Camberwell and Streatham) then on to my Damascene journey to the West of Ireland where I came back with a pile of drawings and something verging on a style.

At this point, providing not too many people have been carried out in a narcoleptic coma I’ll recount my charmed life as a lucky bastard, how my first two jobs were for the Radio Times and Penguin books.

The second half, provided the paramedics don’t have stretchers piled in the narrow stairwell of this ancient public house at this point, will mainly be about Ottakar’s Bookshops and my part in their downfall. Cursed with more good fortune, I could draw pretty much what I wanted in the huge shop murals for each town.

I can only remember having to change three of about eighty or so pictures: Norwich, above, where someone mistook Kazuo Ishiguro for Ronnie Corbett; Slough, where I depicted Sir John Betjeman flying through the clouds with the words of his famously friendly poem extruding from his rear; and finally Weston-super-Mare, where I portayed their Baron, a lovely bloke called Jeffrey Archer.

Alas those days of endless work are now gone, sic transit … talking of which, did someone call an ambulance?

LINK: Brighton Illustrators Group

This week Bloghorn saw:

• An awful lot of hype about the much vaunted Apple tablet computer. The official launch is 27th January and it will be a relief to get it over with and to the point where we can have some reviews about whether the thing will be worth the money. The official launch invite hints at a rather arty and painterly device which might be handy for cartoonists.

• We pondered how free the information you get on the internet is? No, it isn’t very is it? We’re all paying through the nose for ‘free’ information.

• And we smiled at least two UK cartoon exhibitions or sales which you will read about below this post or at The Bloghorn.