Return to Skull Island

I've been getting a few nice comments for this cartoon that's in Private Eye right now. It's one of those ideas where you think, "Surely that's been done." Apparently not, luckily for me. It fits into that category of gag cartoon writing where you take a completely ordinary everyday line and put it into an odd situation, but a situation where the reference is obvious. They're hard to come up with, but when an idea comes along like this, you know instinctively it's a winner. It's also currently on Private Eye's cartoon webpage.

This caption thing is getting out of hand.

The Cartoonist's Club of Great Britain Unofficial Reverse Caption Competition (or CCGBURCC for short) is getting out of hand! There have been literally a number of entries for the past couple of weeks. The thread is open right now if you want to see this week's entries: CCGBURCC. Here's mine from last week. A rather poor pun and one arm is a bit short.

And here is my entry for this week, which is BRILLIANT, and a dead cert to not win. I don't normally do boob jokes BTW, Mum.

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)

Cartoons cartoons cartoons

Here are my latest published cartoons for your "enjoyment", 2 colour ones from Prospect, 1 from Private Eye. I've sold quite a few this month and I'll post the rest when they appear in the magazines. The build Rome one is not one of my better gags in my opinion, but I am very fond of the drawing. Conversely, I'm really proud of the other two, but the drawings could have been better. I tend to rush through the drawings and draw as many as I can in a few hours. Often the first and last couple of cartoons are not so well drawn, and sometimes I'll even redraw them the following day. Could be something like that happened here, but I can't quite remember.

Reader 1 Cartoonist 0

I rather forgot about the Readers Digest cartoon caption competition, but it seems I did in fact lose. To this one:



It is better than mine, I reckon. Congrats to William Thomas, who wins £200 and my original artwork. Pretty good, you would have thought. Here's a link to the page that the image is on. You'll notice that the cartoonists are already doing badly. And the latest I'm hearing is that it's 3-1 to the readers now. We'd better pull our socks up.

Beat the cartoonist