Vote Vote Vote

You can vote for the caption for my cartoon now. In fact the voting is probably nearly closed already. Using my cartoon has made this thing a shambles if you ask me. Perhaps next months competition with a cartoon by Len Hawkins will be better.

vote now!

In other news, my Rock, Paper, Scissors cartoon has finally appeared in Reader's Digest, and I had this silly one in last month's Prospect. Nothing in the new one, though. Grrrr.



A big problem with trying to sell gag cartoons is that the mags often pick what you would consider to be a 'filler' gag (one that just bulks up the batch-sort of like every song on every Sting album). When I sent out the batch the with this one in it, I thought there were better ones in there, but Prospect had other ideas. I don't mind though, I'm kind of fond of this. It looks a bit like a Johnny Ryan gag with none of the rudeness.

Caption Competition is go.

Here's the link to the Reader's Digest caption competition featuring my pizza menu minotaur cartoon. Get you're entries in now! The winner gets 200 quid and a piece of my original artwork, which is sitting here next to me. It's a lovely dip-pen and ink version of the cartoon. Highly desirable. Copy and paste this, because adding a link isn't working for some reason:

https://myrd.readersdigest.co.uk/forms/webforms/Cartoon

A word about King Monkey

I'm resting it for a short time, while I work on other stuff. It's difficult to keep it going when I have a lot of other commitments and I'm not getting paid for it. I'm sending out a sample pack to the syndicates at the moment, so maybe (although probably not) you'll see it elsewhere and I'll rake in some dough.

Those idiots will return!

Multiple sales! Boo-yah!

Here's the one in this month's Prospect. I enjoyed thinking of this one, because of the simplicity of the caption. It's always good when you come up with an idea based on such a simple and well-known phrase. One kind of similar joke is 'Bad dog!'. There are three great ones that have been in The New Yorker. Danny Shanahan had a female dog telling off a male dog whilst in bed together 'Bad sex! Bad, bad, bad sex!', David Sipress has the other two. The first shows a guy telling off a crudely drawn dog 'Bad drawing!' and best of all the other has a guy waggling his finger at a cat; 'Bad dog!' I would love to come up with my own bad dog cartoon, but how can I better those?

I actually sold this one to The Spectator too, but Prospect had already taken it. Cue an awkward conversation with their cartoon editor telling them they couldn't, in fact, use it. There's another one (which is rather silly) to come in the next issue of Prospect, too.

This one's in the new Private Eye, out today. It started off as 'Love the lack of taste', but a simplification of the words made it work much better. It's a little more absurd now. I hate to draw straight lines with my drawing pad into photoshop. so this was a bit of a pain. I used to use a dip-pen and a bottle of ink, but I'm able to replicate that line digitally now, which saves time, storage and is a hell of a lot cleaner. A lot of people are surprised to hear that I don't work on paper and I don't make roughs either, other than a tiny sketch in my sketchbook when I think up the idea. I work them straight up without roughing out the shapes or anything. Perhaps I will post the stages I got through for a finished cartoon some day...

Sold

Been a while...I must update this thing more often. This is a simple post: I'm in the new issue of Private Eye with this zinger:

It's one of those ones where you think of some stupid meaningless phrase and apply the logic of it to a situation. When I come up with one of these I always think 'It must have been done!' A cursory google search usually reveals that it hasn't been. There must be a finite amount of these cartoons that can possibly be thought of but, much like the 3 minute pop song, you can always find something new to do.

I've also sold one to Prospect, but I won't stick that up until the magazine is out. Well it might dent their sales and we couldn't have that, could we?

Merry Christmas!

To all my reader!

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