A Netanyahu Cartoon

And watercolours are still a bugger to master...

A Putin Cartoon

A Corbyn/Watson/Labour Conference Cartoon

This one doesn't quite work and I haven't time to fix it. Composition could have been better...

A Donald Trump Cartoon

A David Cameron in the bathtub cartoon

New Tory Cabinet Sets Agenda

Calm

Okay. I've had a cup of coffee and my mind has settled. I don't feel quite as dog drawn out bad as I felt yesterday.

It's been a strange business, dealing with my now no-longer missing Guardian Witness cartoon. Years ago, when I was first writing my first Spine blog, I'd post daily Photoshops. This was before Photoshopping images became known as 'mash ups' or became so prevalent that everybody and their whiskery-soaked aunt began doing them. My blog was nominated as one of Yahoo UK's 'Finds of the Year'. I had a few other minor whoopee moments. My work appeared occasionally on the big political blogs and in a few newspapers.

About that time, I became friendly with a journalist who worked for The Guardian. He asked his editor if they'd accept any of my Photoshops. The message that came back was that they'd love to but they were deeply concerned about image rights. Since my Photoshops were made up of other images, they couldn't publish my work for fear of breaking some third party's copyright. Around this time, one of my photos appeared on 'Have I Got News For You' and I spent a crazy afternoon sourcing the images for the people at Hattrick Productions. The people whose photos I'd used were paid well for their photos. I didn't receive a bloody thing.

It was that which made up my mind. I made a vow that I'd never again be at the mercy of third parties. I would diligently uphold the copyright laws and I wouldn't borrow a single thing to do my work.

It's meant losing out on a lot of the exposure you get when Photoshopping. I saw other people getting huge followings on Twitter with pretty poor quality Photoshops but I gritted my teeth. I wanted to do something better. I wanted to do something more worthwhile. And, thus far, I've been fairly loyal to my principals. Most of what I did from that point on was my own work, with perhaps the main exception being a photo of Richard Madeley which I used for my Stan Madeley project. Yet even that was probably sourced and paid for.

All of which makes it so bloody ironic that the Guardian withheld my cartoon because they thought I'd nicked it!

It's more ironic when you consider that the majority of photos on those Witness pages obviously use borrowed images. There's one there that largely contains a screen grab from the John Carpenter film 'They Live'. I don't know if Universal Pictures really care about lightweight 'borrowing' from their movies but this is the problem with the copyright laws as they stand. just how transformative does something have to be before it becomes transformative?

The other side of the problem is that the Photoshop culture is slowly killing the market for real cartoons. Photoshops have a veracity that you never get with ink. To appreciate a cartoon, you have to be a fan of cartoons and that requires imagination, an aesthetic sense, and perhaps even a certain refinement. To appreciate a Photoshop, you merely have to eyes to see. Photoshops are an easy laugh. Even bad Photoshops still have the power to impress because they hint towards a twisted version of reality.

The final problem is, of course, money. I shouldn't have sent my cartoon. I know that. It's to demean the art of cartooning. If somebody like me is willing to give his work away for nothing, I'm contributing to a culture where people are expected to work for nothing. Yet I want the exposure. I want my cartoons seen by people.

Sigh... I really do have a book I want to finish writing. I want to finish it before the year ends. I should go and write some proper words. And maybe later today, I might draw another cartoon.

European Telephone Cartoon

Makes more sense if you've seen this.

A Jean Marie La Pen Cartoon

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

Religious Cartoon

A Quick Cartoon About CIA Torture

Tuesday's Political Cartoon

A Cartoon About Plebgate and Chickens

An Ed Miliband Cartoon

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.

Winter Sport

Not my best but last night I was hugely tired and my eyes were aching, probably from too much drawing.

 

Storm Latest: Cameron Ready To Make Tough Decisions

More Drugs For Justin and God Take Pity on His Soul…

It takes a complete mastery of the modern telecommunications network to ensure that not much crosses this desk headed with Bieber facts or Bieber news. It means I now know too little about Justin Bieber to make any informed comments about his recent arrest. No doubt I’ll struggle to make any cogent points about him in the next 1000 hard fought words but I won’t let that stop me. No sir! I’m determined to do what I’ve set out to achieve and that’s to explain why I utterly despise Justin Bieber, a man I know next to nothing about.

I couldn’t, for example, hum you one of his songs. I couldn’t recite you a Bieber lyric or even tell you if he’s had a Number One hit in the USA or Europe. I recall some small details from news stories that have been on the TV that’s in the same room as I’ve sat brooding away in my hatred of the man. I know that he found fame on Youtube and then he was arrested driving a yellow Lamborghini. I’m also sure some things happened between those two world changing events but I don’t recall what they were. He might have had a relationship with some young actress, singer or model but there I’m really stretching my knowledge and it would be the thick end of guesswork to say if she even was an actress, singer, or model. I do, however, know he used to have a fringe worthy of Lloyd Christmas and now he’s all bad-boy with a razored look reminiscent of the less talented of Elton John’s shaved pair. I think he also owns a monkey and its name might or might not be Bubbles. However, this post isn’t about his monkey. This post is about how I utterly despise Justin Bieber, a man I know next to nothing about.

Thankfully, the reason I utterly despise Justin Bieber has nothing to do with Justin Bieber and everything to do with his fans. I suppose this blog post would more accurately be described as being about how I utterly despise Justin Bieber fans, about whom I unfortunately know quite a bit.

I know, for example, that they descended upon Twitter like a pestilence straight from Ezekiel, their meaningless yay-boo chunnering entirely destroying the social media network in the process. Perhaps they should be commended for turning a bad idea for humanity into an even worse reality but it’s hard to admire the virulency of any plague that turns a place for human communication into a wasteland of nasty hormonal squeaking. It’s hard not to prefer any form of interaction to their screeched outpouring of impotent love, completely devoid of punctuation except when they use it to produce some florid decoration reminiscent of the very worst kind of anal tattooing. Hash hash heart kiss kiss Justin!

I suppose, now I come to think about it, this blog post shouldn’t have mentioned Bieber at all but, since I have, I should say that I actually feel sorry for the poor bastard. Imagine being lusted after by millions of rat-fringed sow-eyed bitch divas, their greased pubescent skin blocked at every pore as their plastered make-up causes god knows what hormonal juices to back up into their brains where it affects them like some exotic frog venom pumped straight into their cerebellums. There is no other reason why they seem to lose all motor functions when Bieber is around. It reduces them to panting hysteria which probably smells as sickly sweet as it looks outlandish and part of the freak zone. I suppose there might be some sweat heaving Japanese businessmen out there who might pay a fortune to own their underwear sealed in a plastic bag but, make no mistake, this has nothing to do with sex. The Bieber business is classic human chemistry, one giddy build up to a glandular squeeze with results as erotic and predictable as spotting caustic soda onto the eyeballs of laboratory beagles.

Yes, the more I think about it, I feel sorry for Justin Bieber and I don’t blame him for hitting the drugs. He’s already on anxiety medication, which might surprise you given that he’s worth millions, but I think we know that the poor bastard will need to jack that up to something stronger if these sluttish Juliets keep ovulating beneath their Romeo’s window. I have no idea if he lives a life of debauched excess but the erotic potential has to be set alongside the psychological damage of being surrounded by these post-pubescent brutes, all poutiness and blusher, their trailer-trash twisted hair fashioned with all the subtlety of a Nazi rally. It’s like watching rats fighting over the most buoyant of the faecal rafts as they float through the sewer. The bitchiness, the scratching, the savage estradiol-induced fury: Beliebers identify themselves by a term that sounds like a Doomsday sect yet the reality is that their religious iconography is so utterly devoid of higher meaning. It’s like watching jellyfish reproduce, the sea erupting into a sick thick soup of sperm. Yet for Beliebers, the sad yearnings of their bodies is couched in terms of love and hearts and cherubs and unicorns and pink things such as the pink pretty boy who couldn’t harm a fly, cherub, or unicorn. There are no whiskers or whisky in the Bieber universe, just a freakishly pimple-free boy who occasionally sports a pair of glasses to make him look vulnerable. It’s all about the coquettish sideways looks and those pouty lips, as obese as slugs copulating on the corpse of a scabietic dog.

Yes, I despise Bieber fans. I despise them for combining arrogance and ignorance into one utterly despicable package. Some might say it’s the arrogance of youth but has youth ever been so brazenly misguided or wrong? Beliebers are a generational phenomenon, like the mass hysteria starlings suffer before they fly head first into plate glass. Beliebers are nothing more than a human murmuration on an epic scale, a cultish devotion to a freak of pubescence, a vain and arrogant symbol of consumerist exploitation, designed by men in offices and tested in laboratories on hormonal girls.

Most of all, they are a reminder than beneath all of humanity’s philosophy, science, and art, we are just liquid emotions that sometimes spill out from the fleshy buckets. Beliebers are our animal selves uncontrolled by logic or reason. They are the last point on the road to nothingness. Beyond them lies the void, echoing with their giddy laughter.