Category — Bloghornery

Rob Murray writes:

Over at the New Yorker blogs, cartoon editor Bob Mankoff has been looking at what makes a good caption for a gag cartoon – and argues, contrary to popular opinion, that  novelty is overrated.

Following up, he considers whether it is possible to generate a universal caption that would work with all the cartoons featured in the magazine’s long-running caption contest, and asks readers to suggest their own. Mankoff  analysed some of these in a subsequent blog.

Five postcards by prolific cartoonist and master of the double entendre, Donald McGill, have gone on sale for the first time since being banned on obscenity grounds 56 years ago. The cards have been reprinted and sold by the  Donald McGill Postcard Museum on the Isle of Wight, and the Daily Mail has the full story  here.

Two months on from the royal wedding, Pippa Middleton is still making headlines – this time in cartoon form. The Duchess of Cambridge’s sister stars in a tongue-in-cheek comic strip, one of several released as part of the marketing campaign for video game Infamous 2.

A New York Times blog entry by historian Adam Goodheart deconstructs a cartoon that ran in Harper’s Weekly at the start of the American Civil War, and which later proved prophetic. It should make interesting reading for enthusiasts of both history and cartoons.

Meanwhile, in Russia, a new cartoon strip depicting prime minister Vladimir Putin and president Dmitry Medvedev as superheroes foiling a Speed-style bomb plot has become an internet hit. Creator Sergei Kalenik says he created the Superputin strip to change people’s depressing views of Russia’s political scene. You can read the strip in English translation here.

Bloghorn adds if you see something we should know, please tell us.

Master Cartoonist John Jensen wrote to Bloghorn about the stories of criticism for the one year postgraduate study into Comics and Visual Communication recently launched by the University of Dundee. We publish his letter below.

Tom Harris is an MP whose hobbies include astronomy, science, fiction, cinema, karaoke and tennis. He was a journalist before he became a politician. His activities, particularly his wide range of hobbies (how does he find the time?) suggests a broad interest in the world around him.

Fiction or, if you want to be up-market, literature deals in words, whilst the cinema deals in pictures and they both, at their best, deal in ideas. So do comics, which deal in all these things.

The history of comics is itself a wonderful journey through time and many talents (admittedly some of them terrible!) but modern comics and graphic novels are revelatory. Countries such as the UK, France, Germany, Belgium and Italy publish works showing the wide differences, and occasional resemblances, between each other. The United States and Japan share the comic experience but manga and its storylines is different from the storylines and violence found in Marvel Comics or in DC publications.

Many studies, either useful or just plain interesting, are to be found in those little story-telling boxes. The University of Dundee is offering a one-year Masters degree in comic studies: one year, not three. Probably too many students will try to enter what they see as an easy option, but someone perceptive and genuinely interested in the juxtaposition of words, pictures and ideas will not be wasting their time or ours – except, of course that of Tom Harris MP. After a hard nights karaoke, taking in a serious study of  ‘the relationship between international comics cultures’ would be just too tiring!

Bloghorn thanks  PCOer John Jensen for his thoughts and invites you to share yours in the comments below. If you are interested in the local reaction to the comments of Tom Harris and the issue you can read them at the Dundee Courier.

If you have been following this story you will be unsurprised that Bloghorn thinks comics, and cartooning in all its forms, are all too readily undervalued in the UK.

It is more acceptable in the cultures of Japan, the US and across Europe to consider the narrative techniques and visual artistry employed by commercial artists as a powerful form for  business and personal communication as well as entertainment and teaching.

The best single piece of evidence we offer is the attitude of the UK arts funding body – The Arts Council –  towards the national Cartoon Museum* which despite its popularity, and the long history of the form in the UK , receives no central funding. We wrote about this here.

Of course, there are some exceptions in this country – political cartooning, for example, tends to receive grudging respect for its obviously satirical and “real-world” relevance. But all too often, the “cartoon” and “comic” are used here as catch-all terms for anything that is unsophisticated, childish or tacky.

Dundee University is launching a degree in comic books. That'll show those who say degrees are being dumbed down!

6th June 2011 10:32 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@TomHarrisMP

Tom Harris

Another political figure, the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, did exactly that last week. Criticising the Daily Mail, he described the paper as a “sexist, racist, bigoted comic cartoon strip”(Bloghorn is only interested in the second half of that assertion, which we feel is a little unfair).

Academic appreciation of cartooning is, in fact, not new: since 1973, the University of Kent has hosted the British Cartoon Archive, a collection of more than 150,000 pieces intended to encourage the study and appreciation of cartoon art, including comic strips. The Cartoon Archive is freely open to those wishing to carry out research, and is actively involved in promoting the art form – often in collaboration with the national Cartoon Museum, the PCO and its fellow cartoonists organisations, the BCA and the CCGB.

Bloghorn is made by Matthew Buck, Royston Robertson, Alex Hughes and Rob Murray on behalf of the UK Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation

* We say please consider becoming a member to help fund them

This story raised a storm about the value of the drawn form as a subject worthy of study. The row provoked by the Labour MP Tom Harris has provided some lively correspondence for Bloghorn. Rob Murray reports:

Dr Ernesto Priego, co-editor of The Comics Grid, publicly responded to Mr Harris by asking him whether he also believed that film courses constitute dumbing down.

Speaking  to Bloghorn he said: “The new programme at Dundee is a triumph for comics scholarship worldwide.

“It will certainly be an asset for Dundee and the UK.

“The MP’s opinion was misinformed. It represents the view of many people who still don’t understand what comics are, have been, can be.” Dr Priego added: “I believe it’s also our responsibility to inform the wider public, and the policy makers, [of] the importance of graphic storytelling.”

Dr Priego is not alone. The Dundee East MP Stewart Hosie has also come out against his colleague’s comments. You can read his thoughts on the cultural value of comics here.

Bloghorn thanks Dr Priego who  holds a PhD in Information Studies, focusing on comics and digital technology, for his time and opinions.

EDITED: Noon 16th June

Bloghorn thanks Gregor Murray from the office of Stewart Hosie for passing details of the local media story which you can read here.

Editor, Matthew Buck adds:

Isn’t there a need for more courses like Dundee’s (at degree level or, indeed, much lower down the education “value chain”) to help move opinion about drawing beyond such ill-informed prejudice?

It would help develop better practice of communication for both business and people in the digital age.

Please have your say in the comments below. Bloghorn will be publishing more reaction to this story tomorrow.

Parts of the Government Art Collection are on show together in public for the first time, at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. And it seems some cartoons have snuck in by the back door.

It’s free to get in — which is only fair as we taxpayers effectively own all the artworks on show – so I went along to see it. All the works have been selected by political figures, including Nick Clegg, Peter Mandelson, and the Culture Minister Ed Vaizey, who chose the work above, Michael Landy’s Compulsory Obsolescence (click to enlarge).

This caught my eye as it features a strip from Viz comic, as well as other cartoons and some humorous writing. There are letters, faxes and other paraphernalia, all of which are reactions to Landy’s most famous work: Break Down, which saw him destroy everything he owns in 2001.

Now, we’ve been here before, with “proper artists” appropriating the work of cartoonists, as well as posh galleries showing us what they think is funny. But this is a bit different.

Crucially, this is not a collage. Nor is it a print of a collage. In fact, the whole thing is a meticulous pen and ink drawing on a very big piece of paper (70cm by 99cm). That in itself made it quite impressive, as well as making me fear for Landy’s sanity as it must have taken an age to create.

The Viz strip, a two-page “The Critics” story which mercilessly takes the mickey out of Landy, is, of course, very funny. But what’s also funny is the thought of the victim of the strip slavishly copying it out. I found that oddly moving, like the ultimate expression of British people being willing to laugh at themselves!

Unlike the anonymous cartoonists appropriated by the likes of the painter Roy Lichtenstein, the creator of “The Critics”, John Fardell, is credited, as are others featured in the work. I found it a fascinating piece and could have spent a lot longer poring over its details.

As a footnote, although they’re not in this show, the Government Art Collection does include cartoons, such as this one, right, by Vicky. Government art buyers: you need look no further …

Rob Murray writes:

Cartoonists have a habit of predicting the future, but Cam Cardow, cartoonist for the Ottawa Citizen, is more prescient than most. He was the first to satirise the news that Arnold Schwarzenegger had fathered a child outside of his marriage – eight years before the story became known. The Washington Post has the full story and cartoon from 2003 here.

Meanwhile, the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon series The Flintstones is due for a modern makeover – courtesy of  Seth MacFarlane, one of animation’s most controversial  success stories. Whether the remake will be closer to the original Flintstones series or to Family Guy remains to be seen, but you can read more courtesy of BBC News.

Cult 2004 film comedy Napoleon Dynamite has also been reinterpreted in cartoon format, debuting in the US this summer and featuring the cast of the original film.

Bloghorn also spotted an impressive piece of pavement art over at the Forbidden Planet – a truly vertigo-inducing optical illusion featuring Batman and Robin.

US cartoonist Ted Rall has put himself up for sale on Ebay which is an admirably direct way of demonstrating the service a cartoonist provides.

I'll draw a political cartoon to order http://tinyurl.com/3bdrxqa Bidding is only $51!

5th May 2011 8:23 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@TedRall

Ted Rall

Bloghorn sees it’s a low bid at present but last week’s debut auction did this.

Good luck Ted.

Cartoon by Mick Stevens © The New Yorker

Over at the New Yorker blog, cartoon editor Bob Mankoff notes that Osama bin Laden had disappeared off their humour radar for a while, the 2007 cartoon above being his last appearance.

He takes a look at Bin Laden cartoons down the years and notes that in the age of terrorism – and this is no doubt acutely true in the city that suffered the worst al-Qaida attack – “the unspoken point was that laughter was part of being alive”. Read the article here.

Meanwhile, the PCO’s own Bill Stott looks here at how caricaturists can deflate the fear of tyrants and terrorists, even if their shadowy nature can make it difficult:

As “the world’s most wanted man”, Osama bin Laden had also been among the most caricatured. His very distinctive features were a gift to satirical artists, as was his dress code, alternating as it did between Arabic tradition and military camouflage.

I wonder if our doughty band of caricaturists has already perfected their versions of his successor. Who he? Well, he is an Egyptian academic, a surgeon no less, called Ayman al-Zawahiri.

He will now, in Western eyes at least, don the leader’s mantle. But al-Zawahiri, at first glance, does not have the strong facial characteristics of Bin Laden. He looks like a bespectacled 60-something scholar.

How things have changed. Despite leaps in communication technology, we don’t really know what al-Qaida’s movers and shakers look like. During the Second World War, our caricaturists had all the Nazi hierarchy off to a tee. From Hitler himself down through Goering, Himmler, Ribbentrop and Goebbels, caricaturists had a field day. Humour proved to be a very effective deflater.

The difference now is that al-Qaida supremos are mostly very secretive, and are visual mysteries. They don’t strut about the place like the Nazis did. So it’s harder for our caricaturists to diminish them through humour as effectively.

Fear of terrorism, of this facelessness, gives it the weapon of sinister mystery. And I’m not talking about religious differences here and the questionable decisions of Danish publishers, but wondering, just wondering, if the al-Qaida bogeyman couldn’t be cut down to size – just a little – by our excellent caricaturists.

Got any thoughts on the humour used to attack tyrants and terrorists? Comments welcome below, as ever.

While parts of the country are reeling under the weight of Royal Wedding merchandise (see here) the UK is also having its traditional May elections.

Cartoonist and new Bloghorn contributor Rob Murray, writes:

Candidate Dafydd Trystan Davies is campaigning with something a bit different from the traditional manifesto, instead commissioning a cartoon strip that outlines his ambitions for the constituency he hopes to represent.

Image © Dai Owen

The strip, by artist Dai Owen, shows Davies travelling through Cynon Valley in South Wales and touches on his goals for public transport, employment, housing and the local health service.

Image © Dai Owen

Davies, the Plaid Cymru candidate for the seat, told the Western Mail that the cartoon has already gone down well with the public. “They’ve laughed and they’ve read it – two important things,” he said, adding: “It’s a fun way to get a message across to people who are by and large disengaged with politics.”

Bloghorn would like to see more cartoons being used in publicity campaigns, be they political, commercial or charitable.

Bloghorn has noted that there is not as much overt anti- monarchist feeling in the UK as we might have expected in the run-up to the royal wedding. Instead, the attitude seems to be a particularly British one: let them get on with it but we reserve our right to take the royal pee out of the whole thing.

This “official engagement portrait”, above, by David O’Connell, is a perfect example. He has also produced a wickedly non-reverent comic called Kate Middleton: In Her Own Words, which in less-enlightened times may have seen him locked up in the Tower .

What has been particularly notable is that unlike the 1980s, when Chas and Di got hitched, people now have access to all kinds of digital media production. As a result, rather than accepting the chintzy tea towels and mugs thrown at them in the past, they are able to create their own alternative wedding merchandise and market it via the web.

The most prominent and successful item has probably been Lydia Leith’s royal wedding sick bags, but there are many others. There’s the commemorative plate that declares “Thanks for the free day off” and describes the occasion as a “4 day bender”. Those of a sartorial bent can don a “Celebrate, peasants!” T-shirt. There are some cartoon coasters, above, available at Scary Go Round, to stick your royal wedding mug on, and for those who are, er, overcome by the whole occasion, you can buy a pack of Crown Jewels condoms.

Some bigger names have jumped on the bandwagon. Foulmouthed satirists Modern Toss have produced a commemorative mug which admits that it will probably end up “dumped in the shed filled up with old screws ‘n’ s***” . And the Guardian’s Steve Bell talks about creating his own mug in this video.

If you do make it to London to see the royal nuptials, you could pop to the South Bank where you will see Kate and Wills rendered by the graffiti artist Rich Simmons as Sid and Nancy. Respect.

If you have seen any other amusing examples of disrespectful royal wedding tat, let us know in the comments below.