Gordon Brown cartoon by Morten Morland

The Political Cartoon Gallery’s Tory Blues exhibition has now closed so, in the interests of balance, attention is turned to the Labour Party.
Browned Off! A cartoon exhibition on the first 18 months of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, opens at the gallery on Wednesday (January 21) and runs until March 14.

The show will feature Britain’s top political cartoonists, such as Peter Brookes, Steve Bell, Dave Brown, Nicholas Garland and Christian Adams, and include PCOers Martin Rowson, Morten Morland, Andy Davey and Matt Buck.

Gordon Brown cartoon by Andy Davey

The Political Cartoon Gallery, at 32 Store Street, London, is open Monday to Friday 9.30am – 5.30pm and on Saturdays between 11.30am – 5.30pm.

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

Bloghorn spotted this great work this week …

One: Mike Turner in Private Eye on things financial

Two: Morten Morland in The Times: “Going down”

Three: Paul Thomas in The Express: On resigning

Week ending 3rd October 2008

The PCO: British cartoon talent

Bloghorn spotted this great work this week…

One: Kipper Williams in the Spectator on unpleasant aircraft problems

Two: Daley in The Daily Telegraph on Barack Obama

Three: Morten Morland in The Times on
the end of the Olympics

It’s British cartoon talent

PCOer Morten Morland writes for Bloghorn:

I was going to write a post on cartooning during what journalists call the silly season. It would have been about trying to perform when most meaningful politicians are on holiday and the papers are full of exclusives such as “Brendan from Bradford can blow bubbles with his bum”.

I intended to begin with the useful opening: “Spare a thought for…” – and follow up with desperate descriptions of life inside a non-airconditoned studio while the rest of the world enjoys barbecue and beer in the paddling pool across the road.

I would go on to curse the party leaders for taking holidays despite knowing full well that cartoonists can’t work with the obscure backbenchers they leave behind.

I would wail about editors who demand that cartoonists continue to produce biting political satire, whilst allowing other commentators to meditate repeatedly on swimming trunks in the post-Blair era.

I was going to write all of that and more, but I won’t, or, rather, I can’t.

Because as if by magic a couple of weeks ago, Foreign Secretary David Miliband suddenly cried “LOOK AT ME!” in the Guardian newspaper. He held a grinning press conference and went on an autograph-signing walkabout with the press in tow. The blessed Prime Minister, who mercifully had chosen to take a good ol’ British seaside holiday, with all its rich, stereotypical visual language, was near-fatally wounded.

Then that pier burned down, giving us another day and a half of metaphorical meat. SATs results were published – incredibly badly. The credit crunch rolled on, house prices fell, the stock market slowed and Alistair Darling hinted haplessly at future bribes for voters.

Beijing is currently hosting the Olympics under the slogan, Faster Imprisonment, Stronger Punishment and Higher Pollution – giving us all weeks of material about human rights abuse, protests and smog. And to top it all, Russian Prime Minister Putin and his little president have just found an excuse to start a war in Georgia.

And through it all, it’s raining. Cold rain.

Silly season? Absolutely. Brilliantly silly if you’re a cartoonist.

But spare a thought for everyone else …

Ed: You can see some of Morten’s silly season work for The Times newspaper here.

It’s British cartoon talent

Bloghorn is launching a new regular feature today: Cartoon Pick of the Week. This does exactly what it says on the metaphorical tin. We shall be highlighting what the folk at the PCO think are the top three drawings and jokes we’ve seen during each working week. If you have a submission you think we should have seen – but have missed – pop a URL link in the comments underneath this post. The list won’t be exhaustive or even always comprised of just our members, but it will be funny. So, Bloghorn hopes you enjoy our list for the week ending 1st August 2008.

One:
Morten Morland on David Miliband. Full cartoon in The Times
Two:
Grizelda on cutting CO2 emissions. Published in Private Eye
Three:
Paul Thomas on beach holidays. Published in The Express

British cartoon talent

One of the problems in being able to express yourself through drawing is having your work “borrowed” or “passed off” as the product of someone else.

This is an occupational hazard if you draw to make your living, but it is irritating. Actually this is theft because traditionally, full-time, commercial artists and cartoonists sell the rights to publication of their work. This business model is destroyed by free and easy copying.

The Bloghorn is going to highlight particularly bad examples of this as and when they turn up. To illustrate this intent, here is a link to an example of image theft from early in 2007. It comes from the blog of Matt Buck and concerns the work of fellow member Andy Davey. There was some interesting follow-up to the actual theft of Andy’s images and fellow PCOer Morten Morland blogged about that.

The PCO: Full-time, professional British cartoon talent