Drawing a Brexit cartoon

Quick update before I sit down to do my day's writing. I've two new articles over at TW&TW. The first is a piece about Chris Christie's hit job on Marco Rubio. The second is a review of the Martin Rowson workshop/lecture from last Thursday.

I also have finished a new cartoon using the tricks I learned at the workshop. Not sure the result is much different to how it would have looked if I'd drawn this last Wednesday but getting to the finish was a lot quicker. With the exception of Cameron, who I drew the normal way but with the new improved thicker neck, I drew these with more emphasis on picking three key features. Gove: jowls, eyes, mouth; Osborne: nose, mouth, eyebrows; May: nose, mouth, eyes. Normally, I'd tinker around for hours. By concentrating on just three features, I got to the finished result in *far* less time. Started this about 5pm last night. The drawing was done in about an hour, added IDS whilst watching a movie last night, but then painted it all in about an hour or two from 11pm to 1am. Probably three or four hours. Does it look too digital? That's my only thought...

I say it might not look different to my style pre-Thursday but that's obviously a lie. The other thing I learned was to see if I can stretch for more than one joke. Here there are countless. That's another of tricks I picked up from Rowson's lecture. I guess it comes from Hogarth but Rowson does it himself. Not many cartoonists seem to pick it up but I like the fact that the more you look, the more laughs you find. Of I hope you do.

I also decided to try to be more complete in my finished cartoons. I need to start putting more work into good backgrounds. Here it's just a wash of colours but I want to move away from just drawing figures with an empty background.

On visiting brain doctors in Chester and @MartinRowson in Sale

Chester just isn't built for big people. I realised this about the time I demolished a display of Jonathan Dimbleby books in the city's cramped Waterstones. The destruction didn't bother me too much. Richard & Judy's blurb for the book says 'fascinating', which is a whole word more than I got for the book written by the UK's top Richard Madeley lookalike... Besides, Jonathan is only my fourth favourite Dimbleby (after David, Richard, and Alphonsus (no relation)). I did, however, feel bad for the young toddler whose mother scolded him for toppling the pile. I wasn't about to disillusion her and admit that my right elbow was the guilty party but I think I had good intentions. That child will grow up with a lifelong phobia of Jonathan Dimbleby and that's not a bad phobia to have. Hell of a lot better than an old friend of mine who had a phobia of tomatoes. Not sure if there's a tomato-based form of Tourettes but he would scream 'c**t' every time he saw a red vegetable in a sandwich.

But I digress...

I was in Chester because my sister had an appointment with a neurologist for her condition which continues to baffle medical science but could well be some magnificent fuckup with her sympathetic chain. The NHS have taken 20 years to spot what might be this magnificent fuckup in her sympathetic chain hence our travelling to Chester for expert advice. I've taken to joking that her sympathetic chain ends somewhere around me but that's clearly not true. My middle name is 'Sympathy' which also, quite possibly, is the name of one of the minor Dimblebys.

I joke but it's been a hell of a week, most of which has been spent accompanying my nearest and dearest as they have had hospital appointments of one kind or another.

The oddest day was Thursday, which is saying something given that I spent this morning sitting in a hospital reading Christopher Hitchens's account of having his balls waxed. Yet Thursday was one of those surprising and wonderful days that defined my week, month, year, and decade, depending on how you view the day I spent in London meeting a publisher who agreed to publish my book. That day was a sublimely good day but not a surprise. It also subsequently become tinged by the sadness of what happened to poor Stan Madeley. The status of 'best day of my life' was up for grabs and Thursday definitely grabbed it by its ears and rode it like an incontinent pig.

I went to Sale to attend Martin Rowson's cartoon workshop and lecture and it all turned out rather amazing. I'm trying to finish a proper full length review of the talk but, as you know, I rate Rowson as one of the best cartoonists in the country. Dare I say the best? Well, sod it. Some people rate Shelley higher than Byron but I prefer my poets madder and badder rather than happy, clappy, or all skippy through the dandylions. Rowson has a dark vituperative edge which elevates him higher than the rest. He's Byronic in his anger, satire, and wit. Byronic too in his kindness when it comes to treating a humble writer/cartoonist to a curry. Yes, that's right: I felt a bit John Cam Hobhouse as I had a curry with Martin Rowson. One day I might actually be able to put that experience into words and explain how much it meant. What I'll say is that he taught me a lesson in how to say 'fuck you' to the world and 'fuck you' to critics. No longer will I be plagued by the words of the 'Welsh Rockweiller' who greeted my book with possibly the shittiest review that Amazon has ever seen. Fuck you, Welsh Rockweiller! Fuck you!

The actual workshop also gave me a new way of approaching caricature and I intend to get at least one cartoon finished this weekend. Sadly, the use-by date has passed on a nice little drawing I'd started of Julian Assange pissing on the head of Philip Hammond so it will be something new I work on tonight as I try to stay awake for the Republican debate. I might not. I'm spectacularly knackered.

This coming week, I also have to try to write some new articles and attempt to 'place' them which means hope that somebody will buy them. I've had real strangers write to me in the past week saying how much they've enjoyed the pieces I've been writing. Short of getting paid for what you love to do, praise is possibly the best part of being a writer and/or cartoonist. That and being able to sleep late on a Tuesday...

 

The St Vincent Tattoo and Other Erotic Thoughts

I suppose it's as seasonal as the migratory herring but I continue to find myself drifting away from The Guardian as my paper of choice. I still visit it every day for the cartoons, especially those by the incomparable Martin Rowson, but I'm increasingly clicking off it without any regard for of the articles. More often than I've realised until today, I find my mouse pointer moving towards the new link on my browser which takes me straight to The Independent.

One of the problems I continue to have with The Guardian is the amount of content written about (or often written by) sex workers. Not that there's anything wrong with sex workers who, I'm sure, are a friendly bunch of wayward souls, even when you get to know them on a non-profit basis. But unfortunately I'm one of those prickly snobs who prefers his prose written by trained (and preferably gifted) journalists. That's not to say that a high class call girl can't write a good paragraph about the global situation but they probably have ideas about the 'Russian position' that aren't for my breakfast table. It's like asking an economist to write a review of the latest sex toy and being surprised when they don't tell you about the size, shape and horsepower, but instead explain the market fluctuations in the global price of pink rubber.

My reticence about talking about these things might be simply my excessive English reserve. It might also be a generational thing, though I suspect it's more about my northern working class upbringing and the world of my youth. Sex was, in the words of Larkin, '[a] shame that started at sixteen / And spread to everything'. Somebody brought up in a middle class bohemian household might find the business neither quite so sordid nor quite so silly. And they might not find The Guardian's obsession with the sex trade so ultimately boring.

Take the headlines from today (I write this at the well-spanked end of Friday). The Guardianistas are getting heated about the 'face sitting protest at parliament'. Now, I'll admit here and now that I've never really fancied sitting on a person's face and can honestly say, with my hand on my naked heart, that being smothered by a woman's ample buttocks doesn't really appeal to me. I just can't imagine a scenario that might change my mind. In fact, let me indulge in a male vice for a moment, just for the sake of this blog... Let me remove the shackles from my usual English reserve and imagine a scenario by which The Guardian actually responds favourably to one of the cartoons I occasionally send them. Let's imagine the cartoon becomes an instant hit and it's spotted by my favourite blue-haired alternative diva of the moment, St Vincent, aka Annie Clark.



Sigh...

Fantasising on: Ms. Clark sees my cartoon and decides that it's perfect for her impressive right shank. She also thinks there's only one man who can ink it for her and that man's initials are Yours Truly.

'Dear Waywell,' she writes in an email. 'Sending you plane fare and costs to travel over here to Brooklyn to ink a tattoo on my upper leg. Very busy writing new album (Japanese spoons & brass bands) so haven't time to lie down. Can you work on your back as I write poems at my desk whilst sitting on my favourite comically wobbly stool as made for me by David Byrne? Yours. Annie.'

Now, obviously, I'd reply with an emphatic 'no' and explain why she shouldn't deface her perfect thigh with a tattoo. However, this is also the illogical stuff of an erotic dream so off to New York I go and I'm soon hard at work tattooing my cartoon onto one shapely upper right leg. However, mid cartoon, the tattoo gun leaps from my trembling hand, bounces off her Albanian banjo and hits the aforementioned comically wobbly stool made for her by David Byrne. Typical of Byrne, he's used cheap recycled wood and the stool breaks apart. With a pitch perfect scream (a la 'Digital Witness'), St Vincent begins to fall, her perfect posterior crashing down onto my face. What am I to do? How would I feel as I begin to struggle for air? Would I feel blessed by my current state or desperate to live so I might warn people about the dangers of tattooing cartoons on the underside of a favourite singer/songwriter/shredder?

Now this is far from scientific but, as I'm writing this, I am trying to detect any carnal stirrings from down below and I can honestly say that I can't feel a thing. It's as dead down there as a yard of Russell Brand's prose. Of course, it might be because the room is cold and my feet and legs are numb. Perhaps I simply damaged myself down there by blowing my school recorder too hard many moons ago. Yet the fact remains that the thought of my favourite screech rocker landing on my face does absolutely nothing for me and I still struggle to see what pleasure anybody could derive from such a strange practice.

Yet it's not just their current obsession with face sitting that turns me off The Guardian. Nor is it the articles with deliberately provocative headlines written by their odd looking dominatrix. Again, I'm sure there's a world for that sort of thing but the idea of being whipped into a frenzy by a plump woman in gimp mask doesn't sound like fun. I have better things to do with my evenings.

No, the reason I'm drifting away from The Guardian is because they seem to think they we should all be open about every aspect of our lives and, as we say here in the North, sod that for a game of soldiers (also 'a thing' down in sophisticated parts of London). Not only is a person's private life none of anybody's business but they should have the good sense not to bore me with the details. Since when do we all have to be open about our tastes, our private lives, our urges and desires? I sometimes realise I'm being vulgar when I express my lust for a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 (the i7 model with a heap load of memory) but what would people think if I started to write out every lustful thought I have towards, for example, the blue-haired member of Pussy Riot. Have you heard the way she says 'blue chicken' at 1:07 in this video? Now tell me it doesn't drive you crazy despite your ice cold feet!

The Guardian still has some sharp writing talent yet I drift further away with every shock headline, deliberately provocative statement, and sexually explicit detail they publish. Their business still makes an annual loss despite their immensely popular website but the people who'll eventually make the paper a success aren't people like me. To become popular you need to embrace the mainstream and, apparently, the mainstream is comprised of face sitters. That wouldn't be so bad but alongside the real journalists with fire in their pens, The Guardian employ slow lane grifters who are good for nothing more than click bait. Bring the two together -- the sitters and the grifters -- and you have a newspaper that's left me far behind. Very far behind with my fantasies as private as they're also very very dull (stockings, Norwegians, frogsuits).

A Theresa May Cartoon

Two cartoon posts in a day! I won't be able to keep this up, even on the dehydrated monkey glands and tiger spleen. After my Ed Miliband cartoon, here's my cartoon and video about Teresa May and the European Arrest Warrant. I might draw more today but I have code to write.

Great Figures of State: George Osborne

I drew a quick Nixon caricature for yesterday’s blog post but I was so underwhelmed with the result that I decided not to publish it. It would have looked woeful at the head of a post where I was also going to reproduce Nixon caricatures by Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman. The reason my caricature was weak was probably because I just feel no particular vehemence towards Richard Nixon. So many great movies and books have been made and written about Nixon that I’m fascinated by him, even if I wouldn’t have liked his policies had I been born by the time he came into power.

After yesterday’s failure, I thought I’d try to draw somebody I dislike and having read Martin Rowson’s brilliantly scathing piece about George Osborne in The Tribune, I realise that there was only really once obvious candidate.

I don’t think of myself as being ‘of the Left’ but neither do I think myself any ally with the Right. I’ve been interested in satire for so long that I tend to feel that it’s not really my place to belong to any side. I’m somewhere in the middle but my allegiances aren’t strong. When Labour was in power, I saw things I disliked about them and I longed for a change in government. Now the Tories are in charge, I see things wrong and I long for a change in government. The fact is: I probably just question the lot of them. Politics has many fine people working for our good but there are too many charlatans and careerist politicians happy to tie down a safe seat on a good wage.

It’s the careerists who I despise the most and Osborne is the ugliest toad in the pond. I suppose we are always tempted to think of our Chancellors as being nasty but Osborne has managed to out-nasty every Chancellor I can remember. It’s not that there hasn’t been a political argument for austerity but austerity too closely fit with an ideological narrative that the Tories were ready to unleash on the nation. Rather than give us austerity with a certain reluctance, they were gleeful in the way they talked about cuts and tightening our belts. Austerity is an easy thing to preach when you’re the son or daughter of wealthy parents and when you emerged from your private education primed to pick whatever course you might want to take through life. Osborne chose politics with the same kind of detachment that other people choose to become doctors or lawyers. There’s no real life bearing down on his decision. No need to take that job stacking shelves in Tesco ‘until somebody better comes along’. For most of us, nothing better ever does come along. Life is no fairy tale and the good guys rarely win.

From Steve Bell to My @MartinRowson Moment and then Nixon’s The One

I drew a cartoon for today but I liked it so much that in a moment of deluded arrogance I sent it off to The Guardian’s Comment is Free hoping the catch the attention of the cartoon editor. Had I the email address of the cartoon editor, I might feel I had a slim chance of a reply but, as it is, I launch into this adventure with blind optimism. I was inspired to do so by today’s cartoon by Steve Bell, which used a similar ‘Cnut’ joke I used yesterday. They say that great minds think alike and all that or perhaps it’s just vulgar minds that think alike.

Speaking of truly great but vulgar minds, the wonderfully vulgar Martin Rowson followed me on Twitter yesterday. It might not seem like a big thing to you but when you’re stuck here in the north, far from the epicentre of world events and you’re struggling to keep your brain from going into sleep-mode whilst you edit a ten minute video of still photographs of a Nigerian housing estate, the fact that you’re followed by one of your favourite cartoonists just keeps the dark thoughts from the door.

I’ve written many times about Rowson and how his panels on display at the Cartoon Museum would have been the highlight of the day had that same day not included the chance to meet Ralph Steadman. Meeting Steadman was amazing but it was my trip to London that made me a true Rowson fan. I loved his Tristram Shandy and Gulliver’s Travels (though I preferred the pages where he used ink rather than paint) and I have some of my favourite panels scanned and hanging from my walls. One of my favourite TV shows of recent months was on Sky One when Rowson was in a particular savage but eloquent mood during his In Confidence interview with Laurie Taylor.

Anyway, my day will be more mindless video editing but checking my inbox every two minutes to see if The Guardian have replied. If they’ve not replied by late afternoon, I’ll post the cartoon here and you can appreciate the crazy level of optimism I had during the moments I sent it and just seconds before the self-doubt began to creep in.

Finally, a reminder to myself as much as anybody to watch Sky Arts 1 at 9pm tonight. It’s the second part of Nixon’s The One. The first part was simply the best thing I’ve seen on TV in a very long time.

Okay, I have an inbox to check…

Political Cartoonists on 'The One Show'

It's rare that I post things taken from TV but I thought this feature on political cartooning worth recording for posterity. It includes some good clips of Martin Rowson at his grouchiest best, though how Nadine Dorries managed to get involved I'm really not sure.

Talking Cartoons

My Monday was very busy so I’m afraid I didn’t have time to write anything more polished or shorter than the video I’m posting here. This another over-the-shoulder view of my drawing a cartoon on the Samsung Note 10.1 and I’ve again provided some commentary. None of this is scripted, so I’ll have to ask you to excuse my stuttering, some terrible phrasing, and general ignorance and mispronunciations. However, I try to talk about cartoonists I enjoy and explain why I love the work of Robert Crumb, Ralph Steadman, Gerald Scarfe, Martin Rowson, Peter Brookes, Nicholas Bentley, Alex Gregory, Thomas Nast, Bruce Eric Kaplan and well as some of the old Punch cartoonists of the 1930. Even if watching me draw isn’t that interesting, I hope I at least say something to hold your attention.

It was also probably a good idea to record this whilst I can still speak. This post was timed to appear at exactly 9.10am, which was exactly the moment I’m due to sit in the dentist’s chair and have my finances probed. After that, I doubt I’ll be in the mood to blog. In fact, I’m considering getting out of town as soon as I’m out of the surgery. Manchester will be my small reward for actually going through with the appointment. I’m just hoping that I’ll need less than a dozen fillings and praying there’s no need for anything more involved that might mean putting my Samsung Note up for sale...

Monday

I didn’t manage a post yesterday and I’m late today, meaning a slight blog silence has inadvertently descended.

It’s just been a very busy couple of days. I worked late into the night on a two page comic strip which is nearing completion and I hope to post tomorrow, plus today I heeled my aging Doc Martens around Manchester University’s bookshop. It’s been a few years since I found myself in a proper academic bookshop and I’d forgotten how much I miss them. It also had a graphic novel section that would put many a Forbidden Planet to shame, by which I mean it was light on the crappy superhero comics but with plenty of strange independent writers and artists I’d never seen before. I’ve also never seen The Comic Journal in stock in a high street shop before, though, as usual with those doorstep thick volumes, well beyond my budget.

Anyway, I left feeling inspired with new ideas, plus grasping a copy of Martin Rowson’s ‘Gulliver’s Travel’, which I’ve been eager (perhaps even desperate) to own since I saw the original artwork on display at The Cartoon Museum in London. I’ve not even opened it yet because I want to soak in every millimetre of Rowson’s genius when I'm less tired.



I then walked down to Deansgate where I had a mooch around Waterstones before my train. For anybody interested in graphic novels and books of illustration, there are a few bargains going cheap(ish) in their ‘Last Chance to Buy’ sale. I really couldn’t afford most of the books that caught my eye such as ‘The Art of Tony Millionaire’. However, for not much more than I'd pay for a drink and pastie from Greggs, I snagged a copy of Drew Friedman’s ‘Too Soon?’ which actually made me gasp and mutter ‘holy shit’ when I saw it. I always search for Drew Friedman books when I’m shopping but I’ve never before seen one. How this copy ended up in the bargain bin of Manchester's Waterstones is beyond my understanding, let alone how anybody can ask a quarter of the published price for such a great book. The world has clearly gone mad.