On Martin Honeysett

Christ, I feel like I'm down with a cold. My head feels heavy and my ears feel full. Last night's sleep was rotten too. I had a programmer's sleep which you might know about but you might be lucky enough to have never programmed a computer in your life. If you ever do much coding late at night (and that's always been my habit), it's often followed by a sleep in which your whole dream feels like it's trapped inside DO...WHILE loops. The entire thing might be about something else but it's set to the structure of computer logic. You wake up feeling more exhausted than when you went to sleep.

Last night, I couldn't stop dreaming about glue sniffing vicars, which, if you know your Punch cartoons, was one of the best ever drawn by Martin Honeysett. Cartooning was on my mind because it was late last night that I read that he'd died just a few weeks ago aged 71.

Honeysett was one of the Punch regulars who had become a staple of Private Eye but his style remained that of a better age of cartooning. His pictures remained beautifully crafted whilst others became more measly. As a cartoonist with a nice pile of rejected cartoons from Private Eye, I suppose it's only natural for me to sometimes pick it that fortnight's edition and think 'mine were better than that'. Yet I never ever thought that when looking at a Honeysett cartoon. He made me realise how far I still need to go.

In that way, a Honesett cartoon always stood apart on the page and was immediately recognisable by the mixture of oddly shaped men in huge bulbous suits and the lovingly drawn details. His lines were sublime, his figures like those of Searle but warped by a Steadman filter. They were the kind of cartoons I can stare at for hours on end. They draw you into the gag, rather than encourage you snort once and then move on. They also stood apart because of the density of ink on the page. It was a style that also reminded me a little of Ed Koren, who draws for The New Yorker. Yet Honeysett's humour was far darker, admirably twisted, and of a Britain that exists best (and perhaps only now exists at all) in cartoon form. Cartooning has genuinely lost another of the greats.

Speaking of great cartoonists, The Times have an excellent video talk (1 hour 22 minutes no less) in the company of Peter Brookes. The video is for subscribers only (and thankfully, I know a subscriber) so I watched it over the weekend. Highly recommended. Brookes makes everything look so damn easy, especially to bad cartoonists.

Speaking of bad cartoonists, I've been deep in programming. I've (hopefully) nearly finished the little project I've been working on for a friend. I've not done much drawing over the weekend, except for my hastily drawn Putin cartoon, late Sunday night. I've been adding quite a few features to my Gag Machine which I might put into an update if I'm satisfied they work without problems. I'm going to try to write more this week. It's too easy to find reasons not to blog and then, before you know it, there is no blog. So, I'll try to write more, even when I don't feel like writing, even when I feel like I need my ears syringing. Even when I'm coming down with a cold.

A Turn Towards The Weird

After what feels like months of pandering to other people’s tastes, I thought I’d start to draw and post a few cartoons which are closer to what I want to be drawing (such as Strange Cartoon #1 below). That’s not to say that the cartoons I’ve previously been posting aren’t also to my taste but I definitely try to restrain my tendency towards the weird when submitting cartoons to Private Eye. These cartoons are probably unpublishable on anything other than a blog.

As I continually mention, my favourite single panel gag cartoonist is B. Kliban. Since the moment I first saw his cartoons, I knew they lay exactly on my comedic meridian. The problem is that they probably lie well to the left of what most people find funny otherwise Kliban’s work would be better known than it is. In fact, if he’s known by most people, it’s because of his Cats calendars which continue to sell. I hate Kliban’s cats, though not his volume ‘Cat’ which is another of his comic masterpieces. I mean I hate the merchandise produced by his estate and which probably earns them a fortune. Kliban himself died in 1990, aged only 55.

Whilst his cats are widely available, his cartoons are completely out of print and you can only find them via second-hand book sites. The fact that his best work isn't more widely available is another sad indictment of modern tastes when he left us possibly the most stupefying (in every sense of that word) cartoons ever created.

Which brings me to my good deed of the day: all the books by B. Kliban worth buying, each one only a click away on Abebooks. My advice is to begin with Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head, Whack Your Porcupine or Two Guys Fooling Around with the Moon. Those three contain some of his best cartoons and are very cheap to buy. Buy ‘Luminous Animals’ and ‘Advanced Cartooning’ only when you have a full blown Kliban addiction. It took me a long time to track down reasonably priced copies, though I see here a couple going for around £20 which is something of a bargain.

Cat

Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head and Other Drawings

Whack Your Porcupine and Other Drawings

Tiny Footprints

Two Guys Fooling Around with the Moon

Luminous Animals and Other Drawings

The Biggest Tongue in Tunisia and Other Drawings

Advanced Cartooning