The Jams

Over on the Cartoonists' Club of Great Britain forum, very occasionally we have a cartoon jam. Usually it takes the form of a comic strip where one artist draws a panel and then passes it along to the next cartoonist to do the next panel in the sequence. It's done 'blind' so that no-one sees the entire thing until it's finished. These panels are from the two I've been involved in. The strips tend to make quite a bit of sense when the whole thing is viewed, contrary to what you might think.


The other day we played another game. A kind of reverse caption competition, where we had to fill in the visual part to the joke using the caption, "I see you managed to get a sponsor in the end then, lads!" It's not really my kind of punchline, so I set out to pervert the competition by not allowing myself to show either sports or a sponsor. (I was the only one who took this obscure approach). I also decided to use some copyright free clip-art because I thought it added to the feel of the joke. It wasn't a wholly successful experiment, but I kind of like it.

And as a special added super-bonus to this post, here's my latest cartoon from Prospect magazine.

Bingo bongo, two in the Eye!

I didn't even realise I'd sold the second one of these, but I thought they were winners when I thought them up. Gratifying that they are currently seeing print in the new issue of Private Eye.

Lost "Classics"

Not so very long ago, before my King Monkey strip, I drew another strip about a useless Victorian inventor with a very big hat. I was looking to create a whole world, with a large cast of characters, rather than the smaller double-act framework of King Monkey. Apart from Isambard himself, there was his girlfriend Amelia, who was a would-be romantic novelist and poet, Enoch, his dumb pal, his Scrooge-alike boss Mr Muckworm, Ratbone the detective, Saucy Jack the fiend, Barnacle Grudge the sea-captain and Constable Dunstable. There was also a mad professor type, a pub landlord and a boxer/bouncer too, but I can't remember their names. As you can see from that list, they were all Victorian archetypes, not so original. But I think the strip worked-I just felt that there wasn't ever going to be much of an audience for it.

The following strips are from the second phase of Isambard, after I redesigned the characters and gave it a typographical overhaul, not, for once, using my own font (which is called Jumpytype, if you're interested).








And that's it. You won't find out how they fared on the moon because I never drew it. And I never will. (Unless someone pays top dollar, or top guinea in this case)