Inside this issue;
Chris Madden introduces us to a Wallace you may be unfamiliar with.
Tim Harries wonders where all the stylophones went.
The Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival preview offers a plethora of cartoony goodness.
Wilbur Dawbarn gets scientific.
The Foghorn guide to Evolution raises a few eyebrows.
And Pete Dredge takes on Horne and Corden.

Subscribe to our six editions a year print copy from here. Or, try a look at (or download) previous issues here.

Bloghorn freebie: Spot on

Win a pair of tickets to an evening of cartoon, caricature and graphic satire with Posy Simmonds, Steve Bell and Bill Feaver at Kings Place in London.

All you have to do is impress Bloghorn by making the best addition to the following proposition in the comments underneath this post;

Posy Simmonds excels at storytelling because…

If you would rather not post publicly, you can email Bloghorn with your line – please put Posy Simmonds in the title line of your email.

Bloghorn will pick the lucky winner of the pair of tickets on Friday at noon.

Posy, Steve and Bill are talking on Monday 6th April, at 7pm at Hall One, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London, N1 9AG. The nearest Tube station is Kings Cross and Kings Place is 5 minutes walk north on York Way close to Crinan Street.

Cut and paste the N1 9AG postcode into the search Google maps for the exact location.
Google Maps

Win or don’t quite win this time, tickets are also available online for £9.50 at Kings Place.

Chichi Parish finds out what happens when burlesque meets art school at Dr Sketchy’s.
Chris Madden gets scientific for Valentine’s with “Love is a drug.’’
Clive Collins goes a bit historical with “Don’t mention the War.”
Do you know how to spot a “David Low’’ forgery? If not, subscribe to this magazine.
Pete Dredge takes on TV cookery shows in “The Critic”
Roger Penwill turns his gaze to windows in “Buildings in the Fog’’
Plus the usual features, and an extra large helping of jokes.

Following on from Bloghorn’s earlier post that mentioned Scott McCloud‘s concept of the Infinite Canvas, it has transpired that Microsoft has released a working demo of a piece of software called (imaginatively enough) Infinite Canvas that allows the cartoonist to tell a story in a way that is unencumbered by the traditional boundaries of the printed page.

In a nutshell, this means that the comic can proceed continuously left to right. Or up and down. Or indeed, diagonally across the screen, forking off at random points, reconnecting with other points in the story or even just crossing it. The comic can be advanced by clicking a frame at a time, or by moving the mouse around, or by zooming out to see the whole strip. Or many, many other possible transitions. The possibilities are, well, infinite…

At the moment, details are sketchy. You’ll need JavaScript turned on in your browser, but you probably have that already. There are a number of sample strips up on the demonstration site, including The Day the Saucers Came by Neil Gaiman (of Sandman and Stardust fame) and Brad’s Somber Mood by Scott McCloud. You can even create your own – I’ve had a quick play myself: The Five Stages of a Blogger’s Life (via the Online Journalism Blog). The tools are a little crude at the moment, but this is a work in progress, and could hold great potential for the future.

(via D’log)

The reader’s editor at The Guardian news organisation writes in response to critical correspondence about some of cartoonist Steve Bell’s editorial cartoons.

Nathan Ariss tells Bloghorn what and who makes him laugh in the last of our posts about him and his work:

I admire any stand-up or sit-down comedian who can actually make me laugh as I’m quite a tough audience. I enjoy clever, quick-witted jokes, but I can also go for gentle, human, observational stuff and even the lightest of whimsy (so long as it’s delightful). I love the strength and simplicity of purely visual – “silent” – comedy and revel in surreal, lateral and blatantly absurd cartoons, because I think I must be really smart to “get” them.

A simple name-check of artists would have me list Quentin Blake, for sheer freedom of line and overall life-affirming execution; early Searle, (particularly Molesworth and St. Trinian’s), and Thelwell both for their superb techniques for what is, in essence, simply getting black on white. Hargreaves for required lessons in describing movement; David Low’s war cartoons; Posy Simmonds, Jean-Jacques Sempé, Charles Ardizzone, David Gentlemen and Chris Orr, variously, for illustration; Mort Drucker and David Stoten for characterisation; Liberatore’s RanXerox, Manfred Deix and Terry Gilliam for grotesques; Don Martin, Gary Larson, Gilbert Shelton, Robert Crumb, Hunt Emerson, Frank Cotham, “Bud” Handelsman and Holte, all for various style and cartoon services rendered; and finally, nearly everyone I can think of with that casual, “free-line” feel: Scarfe, Steadman, Larry, Tidy, Hoffnung, Bretecher, Husband, Lowry, Feiffer, Sorrel, and Myers, not to mention more than a few of the artists currently frequenting the membership pages of the PCO.

Not content with Nathan’s efforts to answer this question, Bloghorn ruthlessly asked him how he sees the future of cartooning in the digital age:

I tend to believe that the future is full of unexplored possibilities and is not one automatically to be feared. Yes, these are serious times for humourists, but I am determined to remain positive about the prospects for the arts in general, no matter how impoverished and altered the markets may become. Cartooning, it seems to me, is the last remaining art form which is not recognised as such, and I believe that the next decade will see a better appreciation and understanding develop for the craft in its own right. There are some exceptional talents currently working in this country, and who knows? We may just have entered a glorious new age of the modern cartoonist.

Bloghorn thanks Nathan for his thoughts over the past four weeks and promises a new artist of the month next Friday. Please come back to find out who it will be.

Dan Wasserman at the Boston Globe writes about the writer and long-time admirer of cartoon and comic art here.

As previously covered on the Bloghorn, Updike was one of many well-known public figures who dabbled in cartooning but found they lacked the full set of skills necessary to survive in its competitive world.

MAD magazine one of America’s oldest humor magazines is making staff redundancies and deep cutbacks in its print schedules. Story via.

Bloghorn’s Artist of the Month, Nathan Ariss explains how he makes his cartoons:

I know, this is really that question about which nibs and paper I use, isn’t it? Well, to put the knitted Parker on for a minute, I mostly go for the Gillott’s 404, lightly dipped in FW acrylic ink and drizzled on to Bristol Board. I have also been known to use charcoal, graphite, crayon, Pitt, Pigma, and Artline pens on “Not” paper, or any bit of scrap that can potentially take an ink wash for toning or colouring if so desired later on.

I’ll generally take on the artwork only after all the thinking, writing and basic compositional stuff is worked out in my head. I tend not to make pencil roughs as I like to “see what happens” when the ink hits the page. I try to work fast and loose at this stage, and try not to stress too much if some rouge elements – like that one – appear, as that can easily be excised later on in Photoshop.

I might produce quite a few versions or progressions of the same idea, or the image could just come fully formed, but I try not to judge anything there and then. I’ll walk away for twenty minutes or so to let it all dry, then scan it, and see if there is anything there that might be useable. From here it might need a few ink washes, or it could just be tidied up, or some elements pieced together as layers, perhaps distorted or possibly coloured within the blessed Adobe – hallowed be thy name. At this later stage I like to be more thorough and I try to take my time. So, lots of stretching, walking away and caffeine.

Then it’s on to final adjustments and printing off a copy to see if I can live with it, just the way it is. Invariably I can’t, but after a tiny bit more tweaking and tinkering it somehow just seems to settle, and whispers “Ooh-ee! I’m done!” Hurrah!

You can see more of Nathan’s answers to our interview here.

Artist of the Month, Nathan Ariss explained to Bloghorn how he became a cartoonist:

I feel immensely fortunate to have been born into a creative household where it was entirely acceptable to set one’s sights on becoming an artist, musician, actor or professional itinerant, which is pretty much what I am all about to this day.

As a kid I was always drawing, and it still feels like the most natural thing in the world to do, even if the tools I use have changed a bit. I think we are all natural artists as children. Unfortunately, it usually gets knocked out of us when we are told we have to grow up or be more realistic. I try and keep something of this child-like directness and honesty alive in all my work. Back then it was all about cats, or rubbish monsters, or people with big noses, clowns with flowers growing out of their heads; grotesques really. I don’t know if I’m cured yet, but I still like to draw people with really big noses.

Nathan’s top tips for would-be cartoonists are:

Take up juggling, learn a musical instrument or just sketch for the sheer love of it. Nothing will hone your skill as an artist more than regularly practising something which utilises your eye to hand co-ordination (hopefully via your brain). Another tip would be to try and develop your own sense of humour. Beyond that it is all speculation and opinion. No one else knows what might work out for you.