The cartoonist's dilemma

One of the key dilemmas that faces the cartoonist is this: Do I get out of bed to jot down that idea that I have just had ... or do I leave it and hope that I will remember it in the morning?

The case for staying in bed: It's warm. And comfy. I'd have to find my glasses in the dark. It probably won't seem that funny in the cold light of day anyway.

The case against: You will never remember the idea. It never works.

Curiously I didn't write down last night's idea and yet I did remember it (didn't seem that funny in the cold light of day). Could this be because I also thought, "I could do a blog entry on this cartoonist's dilemma" ? Hmmm.

Where there's smoke

The furore over editing out scenes of Tom and Jerry smoking reminded me that my four-year-old son never sees these cartoons, as we tend to only let him watch CBeebies, the BBC's station for pre-school kids (no pester-power adverts, you see!) which, sadly, is all Bob the Builder, Tweenies, and the like. So I sat him down and we trawled the net for some of the Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes cartoons cartoons that I remember from my youth (thank you You Tube)

The biggest hits by far were the Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons. It's staggering to think that these 50-year-old cartoons can still make a four-year-old and a 38-year-old cry with laughter. Get them watched know folks, before the Powers That Be decide to edit out all irresponsible scenes of anvils being dropped on to heads from a great height.

Religion cartoon: I confess

Got one in the September issue of Prospect.

Rubbish cartoon

I draw a weekly cartoon to accompany a story in a local Kent newspaper. This week's was very much of the "you couldn't make it up" variety. Apparently the council are now so keen to enforce the use of wheely bins (wheely bins are always big news in local papers!) and to reduce the number of black rubbish sacks left out for collection, that they employ people to rifle though them in order to ascertain the identity of those who dump them – so they can be prosecuted! Nice job.

Such a story easily lends itself to a cartoon ...

Techno fear

There have been no posts for a little while as I've been doing a bit more raging against machines. I found myself unable to pick up my emails for a couple of days – the problem being a power “outage” at my internet service provider. When did the Great British Powercut become lumbered with the US term outage, by the way? It looks too much like outrage to me – though that would have been quite applicable in this case as I found myself banging my head on the wall in frustration as I realised just how much I now rely on this technology.

Out-of-the-blue emails can be a good source of commissions for me. Did I have any waiting for me that I didn’t know about, I wondered. Also, many of my regular clients communicate by email. Did they have any cartoon jobs for me? I could hardly phone all of them on the off-chance.

Things then went from bad to worse. I started having internet connection problems, so not only could I not get emails, I could not even connect to the web. At one point, even the telephone helpline was “temporarily out of order”. They were, of course, sorry for the inconvenience. That’s OK then. Back online now though and the few days of missing emails have been sent on. And although I should be thankful it happened at a quiet time of the year, there were a couple of jobs waiting to justify my frustration!

Smashing time

My computer printer finally went kaput after years of threatening to do so. I refused to mourn because its passing gave me the chance to carry out a long-cherished fantasy ...



I didn't quite go so far as to take a baseball bat to it (as in the film Office Space) but it was still very cathartic.

Insight into the strange world of cartooning ...

Rejection is such a part of the cartoonist's life that the other day I was actually pleased because I got the more encouraging rejection slip on the left, rather than the slightly abrupt one on the right. Sad but true, folks!