On the Friday and Saturday in the town square, the cartoonists challenge themselves against the clock, with huge blank canvases placed in front of them, to complete the Big Boards. You can see one of the finished boards from last year here.

The confirmed cartoonist attendees this year are:

Andy Davey, The Surreal McCoy , Dave Brown, Martin Honeysett , John Landers, Clive Goddard, Will Dawbarn, Gerard Whyman, Rupert Besley, Steve Bright , Bill Stott, John Roberts, Angela Martin, Steve Way, Helen Martin, Jed Pascoe, Simon Cassini, Sheba Cassini, Tim Leatherbarrow, Chris Ryder, Chichi Parish, Cathy Simpson, Andy Gilbert, Tim Harries and  Martin Rowson.

The festival will also be welcoming three Australian Cartoonists: Steve Panozzo, Jason Chatfield and Dean Alston, and a large contingent from Greece.

Alex Hughes, Royston Robertson and Matt Buck will be there for reporting for Bloghorn and we think that there will be a large “fringe event” going on too. So, if you are planning a trip to the festival as a cartoonist or as a fan of the fun, please tell us in the comments below.

We’ll be talking more about the exhibitions which run across the town on the Bloghorn next Friday.

Libby Purves, patron of the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation, which runs the Bloghorn, writes in the Times today about how cartoons help us confront the dark side of human nature:

Cartoon grotesques let us face the real horrors

Above: Libby chats to the Guardian’s Steve Bell, creator of more than his fair share of cartoon grotesques, at last year’s Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival. Photograph © Gerard Whyman

Photograph © Gerard Whyman

The UK’s big cartooning event of the year, the Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival is coming to Bloghorn.

This year the weekend is April 22-25 and the theme is Magic, Myth and Mystery. It is the 7th year of the festival, making it the UK’s longest running event of its type. There will be a large range of events catering for joke and cartoon enthusiasts of all ages and Bloghorn will be featuring news about all of these every Friday leading up to the event. If you are curious about what goes on at a cartoon festival take a look back at our coverage of Shrewsburys past…

In 1999 Ronald Searle was judged, by his fellow cartoonists, to be the greatest cartoonist of the 20th Century. It’s a judgement I thoroughly endorse, though as someone who was brought up on Searle, like most people of my generation born in the late 50s and early 60s, I thought distant worship would be as close as I ever got to him. After all, Searle famously scarpered when I was about one, so I, along with other British cartoonists, could only ever venerate him as the King Across the Water.

Still, when I was approached in 2005 to front a BBC4 documentary about Searle, I jumped at the chance, even though he made clear very early on he wanted nothing whatsoever to do the making of the film or anyone involved with it. That’s his prerogative, and my reverence for him includes a deep respect for his desire for a bit of peace and quiet. Nonetheless, the programme went ahead without him, and I enjoyed it for the most part (although, as I’d decided to speak to camera unscripted, to capture a greater sense of immediacy, there were occasions when the demands of the producer that I repeat a line 20 times meant that by the end I kept forgetting it, as well as forgetting what it could possibly mean.)

Part of the gig – part of the reason they’d got me to do it in the first place – was that, when pressed, I can draw a little bit like the master, and I did several pieces to camera sitting at a drawing board and replicating his style. One riff I went off on was the idea that Searle had invented his version of Hogarth’s famous “Line of Beauty”, which in his case was the “Angle of Beauty”, which I claimed was an acute angle of 37 degrees (I made that bit up, but you get the point) which can be seen repeated again and again in his depiction of feet and noses. I argued further that feet and legs – be they spindly, black-stockinged St Trinian’s legs, or the tree-trunk legs of the Masters at St Custard’s – were, for Searle, the windows to the soul.

All that may or may not be true, but I discovered a deeper truth when I was reproducing the standard Searle script for the “Entr’-Act” cards for the programme. Apart from the fact that each letter tended to twist my nibs into unusability, I soon realised something about that gnarled, nobbly lettering: that without the way Searle drew and wrote, most of the best British post-war cartooning would be unimaginable. Every line of Steadman’s or Scarfe’s had its origins in Searle’s blots. Those blots had shown us all the true path.

Anyway, we finished the film and it was duly broadcast – though in post-production I felt they added too many interviews about his life, and didn’t concentrate enough on his drawing, but what do I know? The production company sent him the film, and were greeted with silence. But unreciprocity from your gods is what you should expect, so I didn’t mind that much.

But then, a few weeks after the programme’s first transmission, I got a letter, sent to my home, addressed in a strangely familiar handwriting. It was a personal letter from Searle, thanking me for placing the garlands on his brow and apologising for the fact that he’s be dead by the time it was my turn. The letter is now framed and hangs in its place of honour next to the only Searle original my wife could afford to buy me. Better yet, in the few interviews he’s given since, he’s been kind and generous enough to say he likes my work. So happy 90th birthday, Mr Searle, from a very humble and grateful admirer…

Bloghorn thanks The Cartoon Museum and Martin for permission to publish here in advance of tonight’s opening.

March 3 is the 90th birthday of Searle, and as we mentioned here on the Bloghorn last week, there are also two major exhibitions in London to mark the event. The Hatless Man, which was published in the US in 1995, was a compilation of more than 700 of the most irate and amusing condemnations of impropriety, taken from nearly 200 etiquette books from the 14th Century to the present. It featured 35 Searle drawings. The selling exhibition at Maggs Bros Antiquarian Books runs for three weeks. Visit their website.

Thanks to Anita O’Brien at the Cartoon Museum.

Bloghorn asked Robert Duncan, our Artist of the Month for February, how he sees the future for cartoonists in the digital age.

The future is fantastic. More and more, clients will want the hand drawn non-computery art for it’s simplicity and pure cleverness.

Walls will be decorated with the clarity of a few lines, and television ads will continue to use simple and highly effective animation – especially helped along by the development of software such as Toon Boom.

Add websites, all the normal printed things, live drawing events when we can show off our ability in public and the future is rosy!

Bloghorn agrees and would like to thank Robert for having been our artist of the month for February 2010.

The creator of St Trinian’s (above, from Lilliput magazine) and illustrator of the Molesworth books, who has lived and worked in France since the 1960s, will be celebrated in shows at the Cartoon Museum and the Chris Beetles Gallery in London.

Ronald Searle – Graphic Master, an exhibition of cartoons, illustrations and reportage from across the world is at the Cartoon Museum until July 4. This exhibition shows 140 works from across his 75-year career, from his early cartoons for the Cambridge Daily News in the 1930s to political cartoons for Le Monde in the 2000s.

Some of his drawings recording life and death in Japanese prisoner of war camps, works which he famously hid from his captors, are included in the exhibition. Searle later produced reportage cartoons for American magazines such as Life. In 1961 he drew the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, above.

For more details on the show, visit the Cartoon Museum website.

The retrospective exhibition at Chris Beetles Gallery, called Happy Birthday Ronald Searle, runs until April 3. It features more than 200 cartoons and illustrations, all for sale, again covering all aspects of Searle’s career, including work from Punch and the News Chronicle, reportage, and adverts.

There are also by loans from private collections, which include work for Life drawn during the Nixon/Kennedy presidential campaign of 1960. The exhibition can be viewed at the Chris Beetles website.

To whet your appetite, The Times ran a very long and informative interview with Searle at the weekend: read it here. The Searle tribute site Perpetua is also well worth a look.