Posts from — December 2008

PCOer Morten Morland won the Political Cartoon Society‘s cartoonist of the year yesterday. Bloghorn is publishing one of Morten’s Post-it note caricatures of Gordon Brown above.

Bloghorn’s alter ego, and the current chair leg of the PCO, Andy Davey said:

It’s great that Morten has won this. He’s one of the best cartoonists working in the UK. The judges commended his immediately recognisable style and use of unusual perspective – I’d second that. And he does it all with only one real outing in the UK media per week – watch Mondays in The Times newspaper.

Steve Bell, of The Guardian, won best single image of the Year, for something like this and Peter Shrank of The Independent on Sunday was runner-up.

Morten has a word at his blog.

Christian Adams has a report here too.

The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
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Everyone likes an online row, and cartoonist Rod McKie has provoked one on his blog with a blast at the recent Cartoon Art Trust Awards. (We blogged it here.)

Rod is an established professional cartoonist, well known for his forthright opinions. In this article he dismisses the entire genre of caricature (“It’s a fairly tired old medium now, isn’t it?”) and all political cartoonists (“They are all cowards who row-in with the ideology of the press barons they work for”). His particular beef against the CAT awards is that they are an “insular, parochial, London-based affair”, and he doesn’t appear to value many of those who won awards. Cartoonists have pitched in on his blog – including one of the award recipients – some agreeing and others disagreeing.

Bloghorn takes the view that anyone who sets up an award and is prepared to pay for the preparations, gets to choose how to judge it. You may not agree with their choices, but isn’t this always the way with awards ceremonies? Look at the grumblings that surround the Oscars every year.

But we are prepared to defend the Cartoon Museum itself, which is run by the Cartoon Art Trust. The museum, which receives no public funding, is among the most popular small museums in the country. There are some visitor reviews available here. Rod says the CAT has “never appeared on my radar” and adds that he knows nothing about the museum, as if that justifies his dislike.

Cartoon Museum workshops cover cartooning in all its forms. Pic: Cartoon Museum

The London museum may seem irrelevant to a cartoonist based in Scotland, but if he did make a trip, he would find that they do some great work, and it’s not all about joke and political cartoons or caricature. Look at the work that cartoonist Steve Marchant does there, running endless workshops and creative classes for young people. These cover comics, graphic novels and manga … the works.

We also take issue with the notion that cartoons that appear in British newspapers and magazines are somehow “parochial”. Rod seems to be of the view that in a globalised economy all cartoons should appeal to the whole world. We argue cartoons should reflect the real lives and experiences of people and any attempt to homogenise them for a world audience would be bad for cartooning as a whole.

Discuss. All comments welcome. Comment moderation is turned on.

Royston Robertson and Matt Buck

Updated at 3pm 9th December 2008:
The Cartoon Museum has kindly sent details of its visitor numbers since Britain’s first dedicated museum to the art of the cartoon opened in February 2006. Curator Anita O’Brien reports that from the time the museum opened in February 2006 until the end of 2006 it had 17,653 visitors. During 2007 this rose to 24,110 and to date in 2008, 27,410.

The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
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An obituary for Oliver Postgate creator of many children’s television animations and an award for Posy Simmonds for her drawn interpretations of novels. Via

Updated: The Guardian has a fine YouTube tribute to Oliver Postgate’s work here. A particular mention for this clip…

The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
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PCOer Adrian Teal writes:

I had a phone call from the news desk of my local paper recently asking if I’d mind doing a last-minute cartoon about our gaffe-prone town council.

The council had ditched the idea of suspending Christmas decorations across the town’s main shopping street, because Health and Safety were worried about them plummeting onto the heads of innocent shoppers. As an alternative, they decided to import some hollow, cone-shaped, fake trees which cost £33,000.

When the lorry carrying the new trees arrived at the council depot, two Iraqi, and two Iranian illegal immigrants jumped out of the back. They were rounded up by the cops, and handed over to the UK Border Agency.

Adrian reports the trees themselves were “rubbish”. Bloghorn thinks none of us are six anymore.

The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
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Bloghorn spotted this great work this week…

One: Stephen Hutchinson (aka Bernie) in Private Eye on child protection officers

Two: Gerald Scarfe in the Sunday Times on India

Three: A spot of blowing our own Foghorn … Noel Ford on the cover of the new Christmas issue of the PCO’s cartoon magazine. (Below – click image to enlarge). Subscribe to The Foghorn here

The PCO: Great British cartoon talent

The PCO Artist of the Month for December 2008 is Denis Dowland.

Denis’s output ranges from traditional gags, or, joke cartoons to “conceptual absurdism” (his description).

He tells Bloghorn that from a young age that he was always drawing;

“As a child I was perceived as a gifted artist, due mostly, I imagine, to my favouring pen and ink which perhaps isn’t the most instinctive medium for a young child. My work covered surrealism and assorted weirdness until the late 80s when a sadly short-lived mini boom in new-wave satire, for want of a better term, and an awakening to the possibilities of the graphic novel inspired me to produce a number of faintly surreal and twisted short stories for the more forward-looking magazines of the day.

“It did not turn out to be a living proposition, however, so I started producing gag cartoons, mostly unpublishable due to size and/or subject, for individual buyers, until the frustrations of word of mouth existence made me call it a day. We had to wait 10 years for the digital revolution to re-open the doors and persuade me to have another go.”

There will be more from our interview with Denis next Friday.

The PCO: Great British cartoon talent
Subscribe to The Foghorn – our print cartoon magazine

King Features syndicated strip cartoon artist (and ex-pat Brit) Alex Hallatt has a write-up of the state of the Australian cartoon world. You can find her report from the recent Stanley Awards here.

The PCO: Great British cartoon talent

Cartoonist Stephan Pastis has used his newspaper comic strip Pearls Before Swine to take a very funny swipe at cartoonists who peddle what he sees as hackneyed and dated gags about subjects such as golf, henpecked husbands and “hot secretaries”. Bloghorn says, feel free to voice your objections to either side of the argument in comments, below.

You can see the strip here. Thanks to Mike Lynch.

The PCO: Great British cartoon talent

US caricaturist Tom Richmond demonstrates on his blog how he digitally colours his illustrations for Mad magazine:

The PCO: Great British cartoon talent