Magazine cartoon: Not driving in my car

Here's a cartoon from the current issue of Prospect magazine. A thesaurus was a vital tool in the making of this cartoon.

Appropriately enough, it accompanies this article in the magazine (though not online).

Click here to buy Royston's NEW cartoon book

Exhibition cartoon: Pastiche or piracy?

Click image to enlarge

I've got a few cartoons in an exhibition called Pastiche, Parody and Piracy, which opens at the Cob Gallery in north London on Friday (June 20).

The exhibition, which includes contemporary artists as well as cartoonists, looks at works that riff off, and indeed rip off, other works of popular culture, as well as brands, logos etc (yes I've also got one of my many HMV dog cartoons in there!)

For this cartoon, I completely redrew (OK, traced) the Roy Lichtenstein "original" (he famously ripped off an actual a comic book image). But I wonder if that was really necessary? Should I have just changed the original in Photoshop as some cartoonists do?

Some works in the exhibition do use directly lifted material. This has been common in the art world since Duchamp, if not before, but continues to be controversial (see the comments here). Whatever you think, it looks sure to be an interesting and thought-provoking show.

Footnote: This cartoon features in my book collection Cartoons on Demand, which you can read a review of here, and buy here.

Pet subject: More dog and cat cartoons

"It's a battle of wills – I'm refusing to do anything funny for his YouTube page ..."

Fashions come and go, governments rise and fall, but yer humble gag cartoonist carries on drawing jokes about cats and dogs. People love 'em! The cartoon above can be seen in the current issue of Reader's Digest, the one below was in the last Private Eye.

"They're the dog's Pollocks."

Cartoonists are often the worst judges of their own material – you never know what people are going to go for – I had few hopes for this cartoon.

My surprise that it was taken by Private Eye was nothing compared to the surprise that since it appeared two weeks ago I have had emails almost every other day praising the cartoon and asking for the original, prints and redrawn versions (including a request to rework it "with the dog as identifiably an Airedale Terrier".)

Expect more dog and cat cartoons ...

Click here to buy Royston's NEW cartoon book