I'm still doing gags, though

With all the comic strip excitement I haven't posted a gag in a while. Here's my latest Private Eye cartoon.

In the final of Comic Strip Superstar

Rather unbelievably, I made it to the last 10 of Amazon's competition. I am now very nervous, yet as excited and frolicsome as a new born dolphin. The good news is you can vote for me, or indeed any of the others on this link: Comic Strip Superstar. All the strips are up, and all you need is an Amazon account to vote. So get on it.

Comic Strip Superchap

I entered Amazon.com's Comic Strip Superstar competition a few months ago with a new concoction called Evil Twin. It's a tale of twin brothers and their attempts at getting one over on each other, as boys are wont to do. It's inspired my childhood growing up with my younger brother and the silly things that we used to say and do. I can't post any strips here, because that would be against the rules, but the good news is that I am down to the final 50, from about 5000 entries. Pretty good going, I reckon. One more round to go where the last 10 are subjected to a public vote. Fingers crossed I get that far.

Comic Strip Superstar

You guys!

My lovely, lovely part-time foundation students in Moscow had a cake made for me for my birthday featuring my King Kong cartoon that you can see a couple of posts down. What a lovely gesture. I was all ready to fly off to england that day, and was a bit grumpy to go in to work, but that all melted away when I saw what they had done. Bit of pressure on me now to be a good teacher!

One student has posted pictures of the event here. The face I am making was an hilarious joke. The cake was delicious.

Made up words vs spelling errors

When I drew this cartoon I wondered that, should it be published, would the magazine think that I had spelt 'Heavenly' wrong? I thought about changing 'Heaveny' to 'Heavenly' to avoid such a misunderstanding, but decided in the end that it took the edge off. Anyway, I forgot about it and when it appeared in this month's Prospect, they had done just that. Should have added a note saying that Heaveny was the desired spelling, but I suppose it looks too much like an error. It's not the first time a cartoon of mine has been altered. There was the great Reader's Digest added movement lines debacle. Private Eye dropped a word from a caption, and my grammar has been corrected a few times. The thing is that I spend a great deal of time trying to get the flow of words right-to mimic speech, or to make a caption more quirky and funny, so it miffs me a little. I wouldn't mind if the mag would contact me and ask about altering the caption-but they never do. It's not the worst thing to happen to my work. Teacher's TV brutalised a cartoon graphic that I had done which appeared on their channel. It was of a classroom with a large blank whiteboard, onto which they would add statistics. Unfortunately they had given me the wrong dimensions and needed it wider. They got some artistically incompetent oaf to draw some walls and details at the sides-with a mouse! It was horrific. I would have done it for them free of charge in about 10 minutes, had they asked, but they didn't and I stopped working for them. Bit hasty maybe-but principles are principles. So, comment if you would: Heaveny or Heavenly. What works better?

Added bonus: Two more from this month's Prospect. A triple whammy.