Business magazine cartoon: A splash of colour

I recently started doing a regular cartoon for a business magazine. Normally I submit roughs in black and white, even if the finished version will be in colour, but because this was the first one for the mag I added some colour to two of the characters to give the client an idea of what the end result would look like. The editor thought that having limited colour made it more striking, so that is how the finished artwork (below) appeared, as will all of their cartoons. I must admit, it wouldn't have occured to me to do it that way but I think it looks pretty good. Plus, of course, the customer is always right and it makes the job a lot quicker to do!

Getting the cartoon idea straight away

It's rare as a cartoonist to come up with the right idea straight away. Normally there's lots of scribbling and frustration. But it does happen. I was asked to draw a cartoon to accompany a newspaper story about a prison with an excellent recycling record. Being a cartoonist, the very first thing I thought about was a convict's suit with arrows on it. Which led immediately to this:



Note: the number on his suit is today's date!

Star Wars cartoon: A correction of sorts

OK, I just looked at my files after my earlier post (maybe I should've done it before ...) and found that I actually sold another gag to Maxim from that same batch, ten years ago. I can't believe I forgot that with my first-ever magazine cartoon sale they took TWO gags ... I still get overjoyed when that happens! Anyway, this was the other one and of the two cartoons it appeared first, in the May 1997 issue of Maxim.

Actually, this is a re-draw. I gave the original away to one of my Star Wars fan friends. I've done a number of Star Wars gags over the years, look.

Back then Maxim paid £60 per gag, by the way. Believe it or not, there are some magazines publishing cartoons in 2007 that don't pay that much.

Political cartoon: Ten Years On

Happy New Year, folks. 2007 is significant for me as it marks ten years in magazine cartooning. Obviously, like most cartoonists I've been drawing since I was a kid and cartooning has always been there, but it was at the beginning of 1997 that I made a new year's resolution to regularly submit gags to magazines such as Private Eye, Punch etc ... one of the few resolutions I've ever kept.

A few months into the year, I made my first sale to Maxim magazine (UK). It was about the rise of New Labour (well, kind of) who came to power in May. The Conservative Party's scare-tactic advertising slogan was, you may remember, "New Labour, new danger".

This appeared in the June 1997 issue of Maxim. The magazine has since dumped cartoons, to free up more space for naked women.


Of course, the cartoon looks pretty strange to me now, especially the character on the left. It was submitted as a photocopy of the drawing, so there's none of the touching-up in Photoshop that I would do now. Also, there was no Google Image Search then, so the New Seekers were drawn from memory! I just did an image search a moment ago, and there is not a beard to be seen. I think I may have confused them with Peter, Paul and Mary ...