Reader's Digest cartoon: The long journey

Got one in the current UK edition of Reader's Digest.

Sometimes the journey from sketchbook to publication can take quite a while. I first drew this as a rough (below) in July of last year. It stayed in my sketchbook for a while as I wasn't sure about it – probably because the iPod had "iBusk" on it, and musical notes were coming out of it.


Eventually, I went back to it, and once I dumped that unnecessary stuff I could see it was a better gag. It was drawn up mid-September. But even then, for reasons that now completely escape me, I didn't think it was really a Reader's Digest gag, so it was sent to several other magazines first. Add to that the fact that the Digest works a few months in advance and turned out to be a bit of a trip for the poor young thing!

Star Wars cartoons: May the gags be with you

You can't fail to have noticed that this month it's 30 years since the first Star Wars film came out. Star Wars is a significant part of the culture, no matter what you think of it. I'm in the "original trilogy good, new trilogy bad camp", as you can tell from this cartoon ...


It was in Private Eye in 2005 when the film came out. Cheekily, I drew it before I saw the film! This next one was one of my first published cartoons, it appeared in Maxim ten years ago.


And this is probably my favourite of my Star Wars cartoons. It was sold to The Publican magazine.


Then there's this one, the only topical one of the lot. This was in Private Eye in 1999 and was about the Millennium Bug, and the fact that we were apparently ill-prepared for the inevitable disaster. Oddly, that now seems like a science-fiction story far more dated than Star Wars.

Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival: Shady character

There's a photo gallery from the Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival over at a website called Virtual Shropshire.

One of the pics features yours truly, on the left, and Matt Buck.

I'm wearing sunglasses because the sun is behind me and that is one big old blank white board. It was giving off quite a glare. It's not some misguided attempt to look cool. That would certainly be offset by the paunch and the dodgy haircut. (Don't worry, I'm OK with my appearance, this is not going to be one of those Lily Allen-style angst blogs!)

I've written on this blog earlier about my board cartoon and the festival exhibition.

There's also a short video on the festival here.

Political cartoons: Bye bye Blair

With the departure of the Prime Minister imminent – Tony Blair is set to announce his resignation tomorrow – the Channel 4 News website commissioned a few cartoonists and illustrators to create a gallery on ten years of Blair.

Here are my two contributions.



You can see the full gallery, featuring Matt Buck, Morten Morland, Beau Bo D’Or and The Spine, here: The Blair Years

Hey Joe

There's a short interview with me, largely on the subject of blogging, over at the Joe Blogs site.

It's a sign

Those websites where you can make "signs" with your name on are clearly designed to appeal to the worst kind of egomaniac.

Newspaper cartoon: Aftershock

You may have heard in the national news that we recently had an EARTHQUAKE!!! here in Kent. (Actually, it was about 30 miles away, in Folkestone, and we never felt any tremors in Broadstairs.) One of the newspapers I draw for had a story about a school science class that only a week earlier had made a model of a building designed to withstand an earthquake. The model, built out of spaghetti (no, really) was, er, destroyed in the earthquake. Here's the cartoon: