Another 2nd place in the reverse caption comp.

I feel like Buzz Aldrin. Or Tony Jarrett.

Master of glove puppets

I really love the magazine Private Eye. Not for it's design, which is appalling, but for it's content. I can't spend longer than a 0.3th of a nanosecond looking at most magazines without wondering, with bewilderment, who would buy such an insipid pile of old pants? When I go to the hairdresser (barbers-can't trust 'em) they plonk a couple of magazines on the little shelf thing below the mirror-usually Stuff or GQ or Esquire, and I flick through them, sigh a bit and put them down again. They don't have anything interesting to read in them at all. Give me a New Scientist or a Prospect or a Private Eye every time. What's wrong with actually learning something when you read a magazine? I read all the sections in Private Eye, even the ones I don't understand like 'In The City' because they are well written, are based on actual research, and tell you stuff that the papers should be reporting. I'm biased towards Private Eye because they sometimes print my cartoons you might say, but let me assure you nothing could be further from something that is very far away from the truth. It's just that I don't want to read about Brangelina and tiny laptops and look at endless pictures of boobies and sweat patches.

Anyhoo, here is one of the latest ones from PE's hallowed pages.

Soup of the day

Number 2 with a bullet.

Here's a cartoon drawing I did for the ol' CCGB compo last week and it came second, despite being a bit crapuloso. Tricky caption (and they're getting trickier by the week-I hope the thing doesn't peter out). I've also just started getting into Twitter, so click on the link on the left to follow me, and I'll follow you back.

Peter Out. That's a good name for a cartoon character. Jay Peg. That's another one.

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.