Les Barton, a fine cartoonist who worked in both the gag cartoons and the comics markets, has died. He was as well known for cartoons in magazines such as Punch as for his comic work, including the much-loved “I Spy” in Sparky.

Born in 1923, he began selling cartoons in the 1940s and was a long-standing member of the Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain, attending its inaugural meeting in 1960.

Cartoonist and blogger Lew Stringer has more on the comics work of Les Barton.
UPDATED: 26th November 2008. Full obituary written by Dr Mark Bryant from The Independent newspaper.

The PCO: Great British cartoon talent

PCO cartoonist Martin Honeysett writes:

I was a Punch man. I started in the 1970s when Bill Davis was editor and continued until its final demise. It took a year of weekly submissions before I got accepted and once that happened I felt I’d arrived. For a freelance gag cartoonist Punch was the business, and a great shop window for our craft. Its closure marked the beginning of a decline for this particular avenue of cartooning.

The PCO: Great British cartoon talent

A book launch for The Best of Punch Cartoons took place at Harrods in West London last night. PCOer Pete Dredge reports

There was a healthy turnout of cartoonists with many PCO members on show; Clive Collins, Martin Honeysett, Ken Pyne, Geoff Thompson, John Jensen, Nick Newman, Chris Burke, Steve Way, Stan McMurtry, Arthur Reid, Mike Turner, Adam Singleton, Martin Rowson, Royston Robertson and Colin Earle were all there.

It was “just like the old Punch do’s” according to the Daily Mail’s Mac (McMurtry), but it felt more like a long postponed wake in many ways – Punch went under in 2002. However, the pile of heavy book product in the corner soon made it clear that this was a sale.

There was no sign of Mr Fayed last night so it was left to one of the publishers to get the proceedings under way. The book’s editor, Helen Walesek from the Punch Library, gave a knowledgeable, academic but somewhat backward-looking speech on how uncannily relevant the old Punch cartoon stock was to today’s social maladies. Sadly, there was no hint of regret that this continuous stream of creativity had been allowed to run dry.

After the speeches (discount book plugging!) the cartoonists were invited up on to the stage for a photo opportunity. It reminded me of those occasions when an old football manager dies and the club invite a host of former players from a bygone era to hobble on to the pitch to take the applause.

No complimentary books for the contributors. I’ll have to get mine from Amazon.

The PCO: Great British cartoon talent

PCO cartoonist Pete Dredge writes:

What saddens me most about the demise of Punch, apart from the purely selfish loss of what was once a regular market for me, is that thousands of jokes which would have graced its pages on a weekly basis have never had the chance to be made by the amazingly talented bunch of cartoonists this nation possesses. They would have helped to cast a little light in these dark days. We all laughed at those “Prepare to meet thy doom” gags … erm, and we’d probably still laugh at them now.

The PCO: Great British cartoon talent

PCO member John Jensen offers a memory of things at Punch magazine. This article was originally published in the Foghorn magazine, which the PCO publishes.

Punch died in 1992. Towards the end of its life the atmosphere in the art department was bright, lively and smiling. I thought such camaraderie was inspiring amid all the rumours of imminent collapse. Until, that is, I realised the entire art-department was working with opened tins of Cow gum on the desks and tables.

Cow gum was an essential item for pasting down the pages in those pre-software days when these things were done by hand. Cow gum was necessary but Cow gum was glue. Tins of it were always open in the art room. Whether the art room knew it or not they were glue-sniffing all day long. Happy daze.

The atmosphere had been quieter, more sedate – less Cow gum – except for occasional brief outbursts of either rage or pleasure when Bill Hewison, was Art Editor. A bearded man of fiercely held beliefs constrained within a polite, conservative manner contrasted nicely with his sidekick, Geoffrey Dickinson, a quietly funny guy who heralded the Swinging Sixties with a cover for Time magazine, the payment for which allowed him to buy his home. Punch payments never matched that.

A third party, sitting hatted, hunched and shirt-sleeved in the office, personally saturnine and professionally ubiquitous: Michael Heath, looking, as always, younger than his experience. Physically, Bill and Geoffrey reminded me of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but the imagined similarity ended there. Bill’s humour, when it surfaced, was so dry it crackled like tinder.

Punch had its institutions: its weekly lunches and its outings. At the lunches the editor would sit at the head of the famous Punch table overseeing guests and Punch regulars. As a general rule, although there were exceptions, cartoonists would sit below the salt leaving the writers to do most of the talking, at which they were very good and very practised. The pen-and-ink boys tended to mutter and snigger among themselves.

The late and truly missed Alan Coren, more jovial, bouncy even, bursting with words and ideas had to get the chat rolling, along with the coffee and cigars. Billy Connolly – the Big Yin – a welcome guest, was heard to assert that sexual fantasies were fine until you turned them into reality when they were, unfortunately, found to be disappointing. A silence followed this pronouncement. No one had the bottle to ask what those fantasies were. And how did he know? These days he would have been pounded with questions and answers would have been demanded.

The outings were different: sometimes a trip up-and-down the Thames with Wally Fawkes gigging it for the evening. Or maybe a visit to France, or maybe a plush hotel in the country, the name of which I can’t remember – I don’t keep a diary and I have no memory for names or details: useless, really! Pat, my wife, on seeing a coach filling up with elderly ladies and gents, stooping and making serious use of walking sticks said jokingly, “I expect that’ll be the Punch outing.” It was.

However, not everybody was old, just some. (If Punch hadn’t died I’d now be one of those old geezers.) Among the now deceased is the “Matisse of cartooning”, Michael ffolkes. Michael was fond of his booze but, what was not then realised , and which tragically was discovered too late, was that he was also allergic to alcohol. Not a good combination.

Unsurprisingly, Michael was given to unsettling mood changes. He could be, and often was, charming and amusing, yet both virtues were too often overwhelmed by a scathing acerbic wit and an aggressiveness which was not threatening but certainly irritating. Invariably forgiven for his lapses (by me, if by no one else) Mike was, in spite of himself, a nice bloke and, on a good day, a wonderful companion. At the lunches he was expansive, cigar-smoking, brandy drinking and serene and secure in his talent. Most of the cartoonists around the table were like that.

You should see them now!

I’ve exceeded my 600 words. The jog down memory lane ends here.

Bloghorn says click J for Jensen.

The PCO: Great British cartoon talent

Evidence for the existence of a predecessor publication to our own Foghorn cartoon magazine has been revealed on a national media outlet. You may listen again to the wireless segment here.

The PCO: Great British cartoon talent

“Unlikely Events: The Times starts a comic strip” by Arthur Watts (click to enlarge)

This 1930s Punch cartoon will make current Times readers chuckle, as a full-colour comic strip now appears in the paper every Monday.

Excerpt from “The Trial of the Sober Dog” by Nick Abadzis

The Trial of the Sober Dog by Nick Abadzis, a serialised graphic novel, is now in its third week. It appears in the T2 section of the paper. It doesn’t appear to be on the Times website yet, but you can catch up at Nick Abadzis’s blog.

You can see more work by Arthur Watts here, though the above cartoon was found at the Comics, Cartoons, Caricature section of a fascinating online resource called The Culture Archive

The PCO: British cartoon talent

The Cartoon Museum has a series of evening events lined up to accompany its exhibition Pont – Observing the British at Home and Abroad, which was reviewed here last week.

Pont – the Making of a Humorous Artist, June 5: Illustrated talk with Anita O’Brien, discussing the evolution of Pont’s style from his drawings of the early 1930s to his wartime work.

Pont of Punch, June 19. Former Punch archivist and Cartoon Museum trustee Amanda-Jane Doran looks at Pont as a Punch artist.

In Praise of Pont – Cartoonists’ Roundtable, June 26: A host of cartoonists join Richard Ingrams to discuss the wit and artistry of Pont. The panel includes Steve Bell, Peter Brookes, Nicholas Garland, John Jensen, Nick Newman and Posy Simmonds.

Graham Laidler, The Man Behind Pont, July 3: Simon Booth reveals more about the short but eventful life of Graham Laidler, aka Pont.

For full details on times and ticket prices, visit the Cartoon Museum website.

The PCO: Today’s British cartoon talent

PCOer Royston Robertson reviews the exhibition
Pont: Observing the British at Home and Abroad at the
Cartoon Museum It’s probably asking for trouble to use the word “important” in relation to a cartoon exhibition, but it seems applicable here as Pont, who was known as Graham Laidler to his mum, is so often overlooked when histories of cartooning are written.

Also, these cartoons from the 1930s were clearly instrumental in helping to creating the magazine cartoon as we know it today. And a tribute to their worth is the fact that so many are laugh-out-loud funny, even now.

Pont’s The British Character cartoons, which appeared in Punch and make up a large chunk of the show, still seem to hit the nail on the head. Even the captions in themselves are funny: “Fondness for laughing at our own anecdotes”; “Passion for not forgetting the moderately great”; and, my particular favourite, “A tendency to leave the washing-up till later”.

The drawings demand your attention, and repay you with lots of brilliant details. Look at that impatient left foot in the drawing above! In “Life in the Flat Above”, part of the Popular Misconceptions series, we see every member of the family jumping up and down on the floor and clanging pots, but look closer and you see that figures in the paintings on the walls, including an elephant, are also jumping.
Laidler died at 32, a tragically short life, but what a groundbreaking legacy he left. The cartoon above looks like a 1930s precursor to the melancholy of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts.

So it’s an important show, but it’s mostly just very, very funny. The exhibition, which includes a comprehensive and reasonably priced catalogue, is at the Cartoon Museum until July 27. Go and see it.

The Cartoon Museum website

The PCO: British cartoon talent

Cartoon by Punch cartoonist Pont. (Click to enlarge)

An exhibition entitled Pont: Observing the British at Home and Abroad runs at the Cartoon Museum in London from April 23 until July 27.

It features more than 90 classic cartoons about the quirks of the British by Graham Laidler, better known as the Punch cartoonist Pont.

The Cartoon Museum is at 35 Little Russell Street, London. It is open Tue-Sat, 10.30am-5.30pm; Sun 12pm-5.30pm. Admission: £4, £3, free to students and under-18s. Visit the Cartoon Museum website.

British cartoon talent