Votey the Vote Vole says Vote Vote Vote!

You can vote for my Dandy cartoon strip now on the Dandy website. Here's a direct link.I am not doing so well after an initial spurt, so go there immediately and vote your thighs off. If the readers don't like my strip, then no more Robot Running shall there be! That would be very nearly as criminal as the FIFA executive committee, which is very very criminal indeed, as you well know.

Bad joke time

This fella is currently strutting it's stuff around the corridors of Readers Digest magazine. The cool mag for people on the move and on HRT.

Soupy twist

One of my odder efforts.

The Dandy

It's got my strip in it and it's £1.50. Buy two copies. One for you and one for you pet chaffinch or heron. You can use it after you've read it to fix the wobbly leg on your cauldron. 101 uses!

Buy it.

old strip with swearing in

Looking through my old strips I found this one, which I think is rather good. Not for kids.

Private Eye annual

Forgot to say in the last post-I'm on the cover of the new Private Eye annual and I have a few cartoons inside too. Here it is on Amazon.

two more cartoons and an apology

One in Private Eye, and one in The Spectator. The apology is for the nonsense I spouted in my announcement in the last post. Reading it back is an uncomfortable experience.I think I will erase it. Latest news on my strip in The Dandy is that it will be in the issue out at the end of October. According to the estimable Mr Lew Stringer it will be out on the 27th, priced one of your earth pounds and 50 of your delightful british pencingtons, as Stephen Fry might have said on TV in the early 90's.

A big announcement

Note to self-must update blog more regularwise.

Anyway, I have a strip in The Dandy! It's called 'Robot on the Run' and will certainly go on to become the most famous strip Britain's longest running comic has ever run, bar all the others. Here's a pic:
Not sure exactly when it when will appear, but definitely soon. Check this space for more info.

waitin' for a superman

Here's one in this week's Spectator.

Doctor Who is that supposed to be?

Been a while since I did a caricature. This one of current Doctor Who Matt Smith is for the Cartoonists' Club's brand new caricature competition. Bit of an exercise in Adobe Illustrator this one. Never used it much, so just stretching my legs around it. Pleased with the result. Other entries can be seen here.

the return of God

Here's a cartoon from the new issue of Private Eye, featuring my latest cartoon character 'God'. He's kind of a superhero, but he doesn't have an origin story like Batman or Superman, he just kind of exists. Powers: Lives forever. Creates things. Burning bush power. Beard. Don't make him angry by being gay or he will burn you forever in his underground God-cave.

win win lose situation

Over on the Cartoonists' Club website I have finally, finally, finally won their weekly cartoon competition. It was proving a bit hellish to win the thing, but after one year of entries (actually I probably entered less than 20 times-but this was competition number 52) I only done it. The theme was 'hot', set by Mr Wilbur Dawbarn (his site is listed in the links over on the left) and it wasn't supposed to have any words. 'Captionless' in easily penetrable cartoonists' jargon. It's down below. I am also on the cover of their monthly newsletter 'The Jester' which you can't read because it is more full of dangerous information than wikileaks, but I think it's allowed for me to post the cover. They had a theme too-politics/government.

It's not a complete win win situation, however, due to the sad passing of John Callahan. Quite an amazing man and a brilliant cartoonist. Even more remarkably he was a quadriplegic after a motorcycle accident he suffered when he was only 21 and used to draw with a pen clutched in both hands. If you can find one of his cartoon collections, buy it-his dark sense of humour is an absolute joy. But you've probably heard of him-and if you haven't, you should've.

Colourin' in

Another experiment (as was Dingus, below) in using digital colour here, in this cartoon that was published in the June issue of Prospect. I'm playing with removing lines as you can see. I rather like the result-more than the joke really, which is not that great.

Dingus is here!

The complete adventure of Dingus is now available on a crisp sheet of A4 paper for only 8 groats.

Introducing Dingus

Coming soon! Dingus! The world's greatest cartoon character of the world!

Here

Self Portrait With Plastic Chair. Finger painting on baby skin, 30mx20m, 2010

Easily Fooled

Eagle eared readers of this blog will know that 'Animal Midnight' is actually a song from Stephen Malkmus' second solo album 'Pig Lib'. What a schoolboy error I made there.

So we've had a general election in Britain and the result is all bullshitty. Seems like we're stuck with Cameron, but hopefully Mr Clegg can put a spanner in the Conservatives plans to privatise everything and put people out of work. I smell austerity measures. Seriously, have you ever heard the word austerity used so much until recently? Electoral reform would be good though. To take your mind off the impending horror, I present a strip I made years ago by cutting pictures out of an old Dukes of Hazard annual. I think it makes some valid points.

Animal Midnight

I have decided to name posts after songs by Pavement to celebrate the current reunion tour which I'm gonna totally miss. Unless they extend it and come to Moscow. Come on lads! Do the decent thing. This is another non-seller that is tenuously linked to the title of this post.

And this one, also tenuously linked, is in Reader's Digest. I sold it to them sometime last year. Two rabbit based gags in two months in Digest. Coincidence? Or is it because it's Easter? (Or was a while ago). Happy Magic Jesus Come Alive Again Day for back then anyway.

No dice, amigo.

First in an occasional series of cartoons I couldn't sell. I've got a lot.

Free Expression

Well, I have finally won a world renowned (Ok-unheard of) cartoon competion: The Council for Secular Humanism Free Expression Cartoon Contest. Top prize was a whopping $2500, which will do very nicely, thank you. I was really proud of this cartoon, as you can see by the previous blog posts on it, but this was an amazing surprise, particularly as I had forgotten about entering the competition in the first place.

Said judge Steve Benson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Arizona Republic, "Wickedly humorous, brutally direct, effectively and simply rendered. A stinging indictment of the Catholic Church's pedophilic priest scandal that allows absolutely no room for the predictable apologetic defense. Left me laughing and wincing at the same time!"

I have reproduced the cartoon below for your viewing pleasure.

Student sketches

I joined in during a sketching session with my students yesterday. Here are three which turned out quite well.
Ksenia
Natasha
Vladimir

And this cartoon is from the latest Reader's Digest. I sold it in the middle of last year, so it's been a bit of a wait.

Classical Sketches

I went to the Tchaikovsky Music Hall in Moscow this evening to see a concert. They did all the biggies-the William Tell Overture and that one with Land of Hope and Glory in it. The first half featured a classical saxophonist, though, and she did an encore that I found hilarious-she clearly had a thing for unlistenable jazz. It sounded a bit like this: Jazz Club.

While I was there, I only been and went and done some sketches, didn't I? Conductors are ace, by the way.

The New Pantheon

Skip over to my twitter (link top left) to name some gods for The New Pantheon! The best few I like I'll draw up and post them on here, with a credit. I'll even send you the original drawing if it's uber-awesome. If what I'm saying makes no sense-go down a few posts to see Duvus, God of putting the duvet cover on the duvet.

Here's a couple of new cartoons too, that I've received a fair bit of praise for. They're in Private Eye right this instant.

Better than a kick in the old town-halls

My recent cartoon in Private Eye (see two posts down) has generated a few comments, both positive and negative on their letters page. A first for me! Amongst us cartoonists it is seen as a bit of an accolade when your work causes such a reaction that people write in. I have posted them below for you to read.

And here's my latest one from that issue.

furthermore...

And the Irish government has just passed an anti-blasphemy law!

Sickness

This is my latest cartoon from the current issue of Private Eye. The 3 decade long child abuse scandal in the Irish Catholic Church is a vile, vile tragedy. I personally do not think apologies and payouts are an adequate response to the way the Church covered up this abuse to protect it's reputation.

"It was reported that more than 300 children were sexually abused by priests between 1975 and 2004. However, church leaders did not report the cases to the police in order to avoid tarnishing the church's reputation and assets. " (presstv.ir)

This is on top of the scandal of the institutions run by The Catholic Brothers between 1940 and 1970 where "More than 3,100 people testified before the commission over the years and more than 800 priests, brothers, sisters and laypeople were implicated as abusers." (catholicnews.com) 25,000 children were in the care of these institutions during this period.

My cartoon is a bit of light humour directed at this scandal, but in a way, I hope it reveals something of the seeming nonchalance with which the Church and probably the Irish government accepted these abuses at the time they were occuring. Thanks to Private Eye for publishing it.

Happy New Year!

At this time of year my thoughts turn slowly, as do most people's I should imagine, like a sated hippo, inevitably, like a goose with an interesting pamphlet, to time travel. It's natural isn't it? We want to turn the clocks back to those heady years that some people (idiots) call 'The Noughties', when Tony Blairs was PM, house prices rose by 200% a second and, best of all, Crowded House got back together. We all wish we could travel back in time don't we? But can you 'Take The Weather With You'? The answer is of course, no. Are you stupid, Crowded House? Perhaps you should have dedicated your time to inventing a time-suit with massive weather-proof pockets, Crowded House, instead of focussing on being completely awful. Personally, I would like to go back to when I had my last doctors appointment and ask for double the amount of cream.