Three Obscene Letters For Monday

Funny how three letters make this cartoon pretty obscene but would it be as obscene without the three letters? Perhaps too much to dwell on so early in the week.

It's been a strange morning. I woke up to see the headline on The Guardian that Tony Hart had died. Not a good way to start the day but I was relieved to later notice that the report was an error. He'd actually died over half a decade ago, so that's a relief. We can all cheer up.

Even though he didn't die today but over half a decade ago, I don't see why I can't mention how much I used to love Tony Hart's programmes when I was a kid. My favourite part of the show was the gallery. We'd all sit around and cynically proclaim the better drawings done by parents and give big cheers to the really bad drawings obviously done by university students as a prank. I never sent any drawings in to Tony Hart. Had I been old enough, I'd have probably fallen into the latter category of pranksters. It would never have occurred to me to send an actual drawing. Teachers at school had told me that I couldn't draw so I never tried. Of course, I still can't draw as today's cartoon demonstrates.

I drew today's cartoon because the idea made me smile as soon as it popped out of [blatant plug] The Gag Machine, late last night. However, when it was finished, I realised that it had absolutely no value. Nobody would buy a cartoon like this. It's overdrawn and bestiality is never a popular subject. It was a complete waste of my time drawing it.

Because I've been adding new features to The Gag Machine, I've been drawing lots of cartoons the past week. The beauty of the machine is that I now have more ideas than I can use. However, for once, I'm trying to work in a professional manner. I'm building up a stock of cartoons which I can send to magazines in a last desperate attempt to sell at least one. This 'never sold a single cartoon' tag is beginning to kill me.

Speaking of new features: I've now got the program emailing joke ideas to me. At the moment, I use it as an easy way of transferring ideas between devices but I'm now wondering if I can use it more creatively. Perhaps even automate a twitter feed... Hmm... So many ideas and I have more data to compile. Must get cracking.

A Doodle About a Drunk Called Larry

A late night doodle based on a late night idea. In other words: the kind of thing I draw when I'm tired in order to keep my mind busy. I'm not sure if it's a cartoon. I makes me smile but I find my tastes are becoming even more peculiar. It's probably not finished but this is as finished as I'll take it. Yesterday was a really bad day on the blog despite three updates. Today my email account was overloaded with SPAM, most of it about tinnitus. Overnight the blog received 12 comments. All of them in Spanish which Google mangles into such unreadable English that I have no idea what they're about. Really dissuades me from blogging today.

Monday's Cartoon

A Doodle

Today's Cartoon

Three sweaters on and I'm still feeling the cold. It's well below zero outside and a freezing fog has descended. Can't get my body going today. Even typing this feels hesitant and awkward.

Today's cartoon was another drawn using 'The Gag Machine' late last night. I'm trying to use it every day, to see if it genuinely produces good cartoon ideas. I usually have my best cartoon ideas in the early parts of the day. However, if I'm distracted or busy, I might not get around to sitting down and thinking of what I'll draw that night. If I leave it too late, I struggle to think of a gag, so having a software backup is helpful. Whether this cartoon works or not, I'm not sure. I quite like it. I wanted to draw a beggar as a skeleton because I thought it might say something about our relationship with beggars. You can read it in a number of ways. Foremost, it's saying that the most successful beggars are those that look the most pitiful. So, reductio ad absurdum: a dead beggar skeleton would probably reap in the money. The other way to read the cartoon is that people rarely look a beggar in the eye and, by throwing money in, they somehow nullify any kind of liberal anguish they might otherwise have. This guy has clearly been dead months but nobody notices.

I draw these while I'm relaxing watching TV, which is why I put in too much time and effort. Once I have the idea and the basic cartoon worked out, I enjoy the process of slowly refining the lines and then adding the shading. I could have worked on this for a couple of hours more and been as happy as the proverbial Larry. The irony is that the more I work on a cartoon, the less use it probably is.

Today I want to see if I can refine my application and improve its ability to produce cartoon ideas. I suspect there might be a better way of structuring my data which will produce better results. I need to test it on a small sample of data to see what happens.

Another Cartoon With Mass Appeal

Another cartoon drawn with the aid of my new 'Gag Machine'. It probably accounts for the reason that any rational person would find it odd/unfunny and without a jot of sense. Yet these are the cartoons that make me laugh, give me the most pleasure to draw, despite there being no market for them. If I had more time or a purpose for drawing it, I'd have finished it more than I have: better drooping fag, bit of smoke, halo around his head, more shadows on the ground, a few 'geeza' rings on his hands...

Being a fan of cartoons and cartoonists, I probably look at too many of them every year. In my downtime, I often page through one of the big collections I have (Private Eye or Punch) or I look at cartoons from The New Yorker via the DVD Rom I have saved to my tablet. They produced it a few years ago and it contain their entire back catalogue, which my memory tells me might be as many as 70,000 cartoons. I look at so many cartoons that I probably immunise myself to the general strain. A few will still produce a mild fever. Fewer still will make me splutter and cough. Yet there's a broach tranche of cartoons that are professional and eminently publishable yet just a little bit bland. I enjoy cartoons that make me gasp because of the unexpected. 'Sid the Jesus' makes me laugh but I have no idea why. I know it wouldn't be funny if it was 'Sid the Christ' or even 'Jesus Smith' (though that one isn't too bad).

I would never send this to a magazine. I wouldn't embarrass myself. Not because I'm ashamed of the cartoon (quite reverse) but because I know it doesn't fit with the cartoons the market so obviously wants. Perhaps the fact I like 'Sid the Jesus' explains why I can't even get one of my more mainstream cartoons published. Perhaps people can sense that those cartoons aren't authentic. They're my attempt to be being something I'm not. Yet cartoons like 'Sid' are clearly not for mass consumption.  It leaves me in a difficult situation at the end of 2014. Can I handle another year of constant rejection? I have days before I have to think about such things. Resolutions are nearly a week away.

Regarding the 'The Gag Machine': quite a few new features yesterday. Using Windows forms, it's so easy to program the little (usually tricky) features. I did a quick search of the reference library, found a few methods I needed, and half an hour later, I'd added a settings screen, with a customisable save directory (also saved in the settings) for all the outputs along with a button which allows you to browse to the folder on your PC. On Android, I'd have had to write my own File dialog and then create a new Activity with various Resource files for the new screen. By contrast, Microsoft have everything ready for you. It's so easy that I've now run out of things to implement and that's the first time that's ever happened to me. I now need to have a long think about what to do next.

Religious Cartoon

A David Mellor Cartoon

A Nigel Farage Cartoon Containing Some 17th Century Vulgarity

Another cartoon rejected by Private Eye. The verse is from 'A Satyr on Charles II' by John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester. And, yes, they did use language like that back in the 1600s.
Following it is a video of the drawing process along with my usual stream of consciousness waffling.

Ed Miliband and the Kim Kardashian Factor

And here's my Not Safe For Work video and my spontaneous rant about Kim Kardashian's arse, Dr Matt Taylor's so called 'sexist' shirt, Ed Miliband's leadership, culture, populism, art, and the lack of real debate around the Ched Evans story. Partway through the video, I repeat a section of video, so you' not going mad if you think you've seen that before. In the final part of the video, I make comments about the Ched Evans story which I wouldn't wish to be seen as a defense of Ched Evans. I merely ask why celebrity should have any bearing in our forming a decision in any kind of moral debate.

An Ed Miliband Cartoon

Cartoon: New Ideas in Horror

A Justin Bieber Cartoon

William Hague Denies UK Torture

Sunday's cartoon. Regretted starting the crosshatching about five minutes...

The Chris Christie Cartoon

 

Day seven or eight of my New Year's resolution... I'm losing count, which is probably a good thing. This is a quick cartoon drawn sitting on a train into Manchester yesterday.

A Cartoon About A Man Called Derek

The Monday Pun

New Shoes

You might have noticed that I’ve joined Instagram. It seemed like a sensible thing to do, plus I finally have a good reason to embrace this powerful form of voodoo. You might already know about my love for all things Samsung, especially the people in Samsung who decide which bloggers get a 10.1 inch (2014 edition) tablet to review. (Though my cunning scheme doesn't appear to be working...) Well, today I started to pack a Samsung S2 phone. Yes, big news!

The S2 came my way because my sister has now upgraded to something more powerful. Her contract had come to an end and she had a spare phone. I’m just happy to have something running Android. I rooted it yesterday and finally broke O2’s mind-lock so I could use my old Vodafone sim card. Turned it on and all manner of spectacular things began to happen. I’d spent a quid for a day’s Pay as you Go mobile data before I even knew how to switch it over to Wi-Fi. The camera excites me but I’ll try to think of interesting things to do with it, possibly involving nudity in public places...

Such positive vibes are unusual but this cool weather has revitalised me. My work always suffers during the summer when the heat slows down my higher brain functions. I need the cooler weather of autumn and early spring. Winter too can also be productive but I have to remember to hit myself with plenty of artificial sunlight or risk running my brain into a black wall. But for the moment, I have enough endorphins and the weather is cool so I can wear my favourite item of clothing: a thick Peter Storm long sleeve sweater bought from Millets.

I attribute the reappearance of my sweater with yesterday’s productivity. I’ve drawn a few cartoons for the blog but my main effort has been the four page short story I’m attempting to illustrate and write. I’ve been stuck on the fourth page for weeks. Until yesterday I couldn’t think of a way to join the middle to the end. Now I’ve done that so it’s just a matter of putting in a few more hours with my Kuru Toga Roulette (the best pencil ever made and which makes drawing a pleasure) and then the inking begins.It can get pretty tedious but I find that I can get through four pages in the time it takes me to watch two entire series of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

I’m also getting together a collection of my best cartoons to send to various outlets. My intention is to keep plugging away, though I’m beginning to worry about posting too much of my work here. Does that constitute publication? I worry that it does, meaning everything I’ve ever posted here is already lost, hence my posting one of my less polished cartoons today.

 

A Classical Cartoon

The Descent of Man