Cartooning Hell: Even A Rejection Would Be Nice

Plenty of outgoing emails this morning and, so far, only one automated response suggesting that I’d managed to hit the nerve feeding raw photographs from field reporters straight into a newspaper’s command centre. My cartoon will clearly find the wrong person. I need to try again another day with another cartoon. Meanwhile, I'll have to throw last night’s effort away now that its moment has passed.

One of the biggest struggles I seem to face is simply finding the right person to talk to. Newspapers don’t list the contact details of the cartoon editor and newspapers increasingly don’t publish any email addresses of their staff. It’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed as the separation of them and us gets ever larger. It’s as if news operates at a level above that of your common man; a conviction that grows stronger every day as the people who make news always seem to know the people who report the news.

The paradox is, of course, that the media continually tell us that they’re listening. They go to great lengths to throw up their Twitter handles and to tell us to get in touch, but that’s one of the problems I realised about Twitter a long time ago. Behind this supposed utopia where everybody is equal is a great publicity machine working against our ultimate emancipation. Because social media feeds the media with free content (‘Hey! Send us your photos of the storm [whispers] but don’t expect to be paid’) it allows them to stop listening, stop seeking professional services, and to keep the controls inside a very tight circle in the heart of London.

I come from a family of news obsessives and once 24 hour news started, we rarely watched anything in the day followed by the BBC News at 6pm, 9pm and Newsnight on BBC2. Sky News used to be the best news channel but they reduced their service to a rolling 15 minute cycle of perhaps 3 news items and the BBC has become our regular source of information. It’s a shame. Sky News used to be something compelling and really special; as special, in fact, as Sky’s sports coverage or their 3D service, which I’ve had chance to glimpse a few times and is amazing at its best. They also had some of the best young journalists and come the day that the BBC retires the great John Simpson, Sky News have his ideal replacement in the even greater (in my opinion) Tim Marshall.

But I digress. Sending cartoons, articles, and books away in the hope that somebody will be willing to take a moment and look at them can be a shocking business for your self-esteem. I’d always been prepared for rejection. I’ve had enough in my time and I welcome rejection when somebody actually tells me what I'm doing wrong. However, nothing ever prepared me for the reality of the silence.

To break into the news circle as either a cartoonist of writer is extraordinarily frustrating. I end up sending work to vague sounding inboxes such as ‘the news’ or ‘tellusabout’ or simply ‘contact’, which probably aren’t read by anybody .

I thought writing books hard work but nothing was like the hard work of trying to get somebody read the damn things. It’s the same with writing essays and drawing cartoons. Selling them is the horrible side of the business when it should really be the easiest. I started last night cartoon’s about 5pm, worked on it at a relaxed (dare I saw blissfully happy) pace through the night and started to apply colour about 9pm. I was finished about 2am. It sounds like a long time and result isn’t going to set the world alight but then, I’m still learning and the time I take is time I put aside to learn this craft. Last night I also discovered that I can do a couple of things with my technology that I previously thought impossible. I wish my craft could make two breakthroughs a night. I should do some night school course on how to draw, though the thought of having to sketch some local hobo in his posing pouch doesn’t fill me with excitement given that very few of our local hobos look are as sexy as Kate Upton. But then again, neither are many cartoonists… It’s a cruel world.

I love Stephen King but he’s just so wrong about Kubrick

I notice that the BBC have interviewed Stephen King ahead of the publication of ‘Doctor Sleep' (great cover, by the way), his sequel to ‘The Shining’. There's a far better piece in The Guardian today, though it doesn't really add to the points I found interesting from the BBC interview. They came in the context of a brief chat with the now ubiquitous Will Gompertz when King explained how and why he dislikes the Kubrick film. Naturally, the BBC seemed to ignore this point entirely and punctuated King’s interview with clips from the Kubrick classic when they could have used clips from the 1997 mini-series adaptation of the book, starring Steven Weber and Rebecca De Mornay, which King himself has said he prefers. That they didn’t means they’re either lazy, indifferent, or implicitly stating where their own preferences lie.

King is of course bound to prefer the 1997 version given that he executively produced the series. It probably means that he’ll never admit that it was the kind of made-for-TV show you watch with mixed feelings about whether you can be bothered returning for the final episode. It is plodding, rather too gentle, and utterly faithful to the novel. He’s just as unlikely to ever admit that the series proves why he’s so wrong about Kubrick’s version.

Let me say that I really like King. He seems one of the good guys in a world filled with fakes, charlatans, and snake oil salesmen. I love listening to King talk, especially when he’s talking about the writing process and literature. However, I have occasionally found it difficult to get through his books. For me, his strict 2000 word a day policy sometimes translates into books that break down into 2000 word chunks, switching between characters in a way that hinders the forward momentum of the novel. He loves creating such full worlds of the characters that it sometimes gets in the way of narrative. On occasions, that huge vision works really well. I enjoyed ‘The Stand’ and ‘It’. Sometimes it works less well. I recently couldn’t make it through 1400+ pages of ‘Under the Dome’. I was sitting there desperate to know more about ‘the dome’ when King only wanted to give me endless backstory about minor characters. Eventually, I realised I didn’t care about ‘the dome’ or ‘the book’.

I seem to remember also struggling to get through ‘The Shining’ but that’s not why I prefer Kubrick’s version.

Kubrick’s film is the ultimate example of mercurial filmmaking: scavenging just enough from the novel but craftily layering it with the things that obsessed Kubrick. King says it’s too cold but that’s precisely why Kubrick made films and didn’t write novels. It’s intellectual horror, not the physical horror rooted in familiar themes that King enjoys. King says that Shelley Duvall is the most misogynistic representation of a woman ever put on film and that all she does is scream but, for me, Kubrick destroys her so ultimately (including in real life) that she eventually finds her deepest instincts for survival. King also says that Nicholson played the character as crazy from the beginning. I would agree, although, that’s why it’s intellectual horror. The supernatural elements are almost psychological in Kubrick’s version. The Overlook Hotel feels like being trapped in a warped mind. King says that Kubrick's version is 'a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones' but I think that's it's greatest virtue. King wants us believe that the family found horror on the mountain but I think Kubrick wants us to think they found horror within themselves and that message is far more potent.

I suppose it’s understandable the King doesn’t like the Kubrick version because his characters are all but missing from the film. Kubrick’s ‘Shining’ shines because of Kubrick. In a way, the BBC report just highlighted this discrepancy. Even as it tried to promote King’s writing, it was reminding us of how much poorer we all became when we lost Stanley Kubrick.

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Other than deciding whether I’ll be trying ‘Doctor Sleep’ (Hey! a review copy would be great! Sorry... Little in-joke there between me and Samsung), I’ve had a busy twenty four hours. I drew a quick cartoon to celebrate the birthday of an architect and then, as I predicted, I ended up tinkering with my graphic short story ahead of sending it on Monday. I tinkered with it all day yesterday and until 3.30 this morning: more cleaning up the drawings, more crosshatching, adding a little more humour, smoothing the prose where it didn’t quite feel right on the ear, and then I changed the overall tint. Turns out that printing greyscale on my on Canon gives things a very slight brownish hint which was just the effect I’m after.

It means I slept late this morning but woke up to find a wonderful gift in my inbox. It was an interview with Sparks, in fact, possibly the best interview I’ve ever heard them give and nearly an hour long. I now intend to spend too much time on the internet seeing if Samsung have announced the price of the new Note 10.1 (2014) edition which, if rumours are correct, will be appearing in shops on Wednesday.