Category — UK cartoon events

Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival kicks off tonight with a drop-in cartoon workshop at the Bear Steps Gallery at 4.30pm, and a talk by Dr Nick Hiley from the British Cartoon Archive on the cartoons of Carl Giles at Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery at 7pm, tickets £5.

In the meantime, the exhibition Personal Bests opened on Monday (also at the Bear Steps Gallery) and features cartoons on the Festival’s Olympic theme, including these:

Bloghorn Shrewsbury 2011 Olympics cartoon © Pete Dredge

Bloghorn Shrewsbury 2011 Olympics cartoon © Chichi Parish

Come back to Bloghorn for coverage of the festival as it happens, or follow the hashtag #shrews11 on Twitter.

Here is another selection of cartoon previews from the Personal Bests exhibition, one of the headline events at this year’s Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival which starts on Thursday (April 14).

Personal Bests exhibition cartoon at Bloghorn © Steve Bright

Personal Bests exhibition cartoon at Bloghorn © Gerard Whyman

Personal Bests exhibition cartoon at Bloghorn © Cathy Simpson

Cartoon previews from the Personal Bests exhibition, one of the headline events at this year’s Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival which opens next week.

Personal Bests Exhibition at Bloghorn © Nathan Ariss Cartoon

Personal Bests Exhibition at Bloghorn © Bill Stott Cartoon

Personal Bests Exhibition at Bloghorn © The Surreal McCoy

An exhibition of Carl Giles cartoons has also opened at the town museum.

Carl Giles cartoon exhibition at Shrewsbury 2011 © Estate of Carl Giles

Bloghorn can announce the full line up of attending Cartoonists for the 2011 Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival.
More than 40 of the finest cartoonists from the UK are this year joined by Graeme Keyes, Tom Matthews, Jim Cogan, Tom Halliday and Jon Berkeley our guests from Ireland.

Three cartoon exhibitions – Joking for Gold by Giles – Personal Bests – and Give us a Sporting Chance open next week in the town and the Smile-A-Thon Trail will lead visitors from venue to venue.

Ian Ellery, Andy Gilbert, Angela Martin and Paul Hardman will be running the free drawing workshops while Jacky Fleming and Chichi Parish will be playing script doctors in a series of Cartoon Clinics. (Get the details on our map.)

And after all the drawing education Gill Hudson , Editor-in-Chief of Reader’s Digest, along with Martin Colyer, the magazine’s Design Director, and Steve Way, Cartoon Editor, will be offering an advice session for aspiring artists called What Makes a Good Cartoon? and Cath Tate will talk about Getting Published.

© John Roberts

Caricaturists Alex Hughes, Tim Leatherbarrow, John Roberts and Helen Martin will be plying their skills in the Square alongside The Big Boards.

And this is where you’ll find Bill Stott, Pete Dredge, Steve Bright, Martin Honeysett, Matt Buck (Hack Cartoons), Royston Robertson, The Surreal McCoy, Robert Duncan, Rosie Brooks, Cathy Simpson, Janis Goodman, Clive Goddard, Nathan Ariss and Steve Best all of whom will be making enormous cartoons over the course of Friday and Saturday.

Dr Nick Hiley from the British Cartoon Archive will be talking about his day job of saving great art for the nation while Andy Davey of The Sun and Peter Schrank of The Independent will be going head-to-head over matters of contemporary news and politics.

We can‘t disclose what the the script of the  live Melodrawma is but we understand Roger Penwill, Bill Stott, Noel Ford and Pete Dredge will all be involved.

Bloghorn has made a handy Shrewsbury calendar to help you plan your way around the events of the weekend of 16th and 17th April. It should go nicely with our map.

It will be a packed weekend with a lively and growing fringe of unofficial events and many other visiting artists. If you are planning to come along, please let us know in the comments.

Shrewsbury Tourism can help you out with advice on accomodation and transport. Bloghorn says see you there.

Cartoonist Tim Harries took a table at the first London Comic and Small Press Expo, at Goldsmiths University, New Cross, London, to sell his wares. He tells us about his experience:

Photo by Sarah McIntyre

Unofficially a replacement for the UK Web and Mini Comix Thing , the organisers picked an impressive venue to debut the Expo, in a bright, spacious hall big enough to accommodate all 91 sold-out tables and a vast throng of eager punters.

The variety of work on show was excellent, and visitors could spend several hours going from table to table and still not see everything.

Talks also ran throughout the day, ranging from “The History of Comics on Film and TV” to a discussion of the term “small press” and what it means for creators. Unfortunately attendance for the Expo was low and it wasn’t until late afternoon that things picked up, by which time we had to pack up! It’s a new event though, so I’m sure there will be bigger and better plans for getting visitors next year.

Some excellent suggestions have already been made to this end, and hopefully the organisers will work with exhibitors to improve an event that already has good potential.

Personally, I enjoyed my first time as an exhibitor at one of these events. I debuted some new books, made pretty good sales and got to meet a lot of friendly comic creators and readers. Can’t ask for much more than that really, so I’m already looking forward to future conventions.

A cartoon exhibition looking at all aspects of married life – for better, for worse – opens at the Cartoon Museum in London this Wednesday (March 23). Cartoon above by Pak

As Prince William and Kate Middleton prepare to tie the knot on April 29, Marriage à la Mode: Royals and Commoners In and Out of Love promises “a bouquet of barbed wit” on the subject of marriage.

It will feature musings on matrimony from cartoonists past and present, including William Hogarth, who created a series of works that give the show its name, James Gillray, H.M. Bateman, Donald McGill, Carl Giles, Mel Calman, Ralph Steadman and Posy Simmonds.

The Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation, which runs the Bloghorn, is represented with cartoons by Steve Bell, Rupert Besley, Noel Ford, Martin Honeysett, Ken Pyne, below, Royston Robertson, and Bill Stott.

Despite being its inspiration, the royal couple are unlikely to give the show their seal of approval. As well as looking at some of the less successful aspects of marriage, some cartoons remind us of a certain royal wedding from 30 years ago that did not go too well, as seen in this 1995 Time magazine cartoon by Arnold Roth, right.

William and Kate may also not want to be associated with the work of Reg Smythe, who features in the exhibition and is famous for creating the less-than-idyllic marriage of Andy Capp and Flo.

Other cartoonists featured include Ros Asquith, Ian Baker, Biff, Nicholas Garland, Grizelda, Peter “Pak” King, David Langdon, Peter Schrank, Geoff Thompson, and Robert Thompson.

For more details visit the museum website. Marriage à la Mode runs until May 22, by which time those commemorative royal wedding tea towels may well be frayed at the edges.

An exhibition of cartoons by William Heath Robinson is being held in Pinner, in the London Borough of Harrow, where the artist lived and worked for ten years.

The show, called Machines and Inventions, after the elaborate and somewhat improbable contraptions for which Heath Robinson is famous, will be held at West House in Pinner Memorial Park from March 19 until April 17.

The Chris Beetles Gallery is putting on the exhibition, which features 80 cartoons. They will be added to a major exhibition of work by Heath Robinson to be held in May at Chris Beetles’ own gallery in St James’s, Central London.

The show reflects a very English response to progress, particularly the technological developments of the early 20th century. Exhibited for the first time is a group of cartoons from Railway Ribaldry, which was published by the Great Western Railway in 1935. It’s hard to imagine any of today’s railway companies being happy to laugh at themselves in the same manner. Right: A simple device for preventing railway policemen from being run down when walking on the line.

Heath Robinson and his family lived in Pinner from 1908 to 1918. The exhibition is being staged in conjunction with the West House and Heath Robinson Museum Trust, which has raised more than £1,400,000 to transform the building. As well as a gallery, it is used as a venue for conferences and as a memorial to commemorate the people of Pinner who died in the two world wars.

You can view Machines and Inventions, which is a selling exhibition, online at the Chris Beetles Gallery.

UPDATED: 9th March 2011

PCOer Robert Duncan writes to say;

Thanks Bloghorn. That other famous cartoonist Robert Duncan was also brought up in Pinner, and kissed his first girl in West House. Her glasses got in the way.

Angst, underlying sexual tension, passion and a rites of passage journey. You get it all on Bloghorn.