Sunday, July 26, 2009

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.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

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.

Monday, July 20, 2009

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)