SHREWSBURY CARTOON FESTIVAL
What do 40 British cartoonists do when they’re joined by a few Aussies and flock to Shrewsbury? Beats me. That’s why Steve Panozzo and Roger Penwill wrote this bit. www.cartoonshrewsbury.com
T
he very worst thing about going away is unpacking when you get home. Not only do you have to put back everything you took with you, but you have to find a home for all the stuff you brought back. For a cartoonist, it means reams of paper (and the odd book), most of them with cartoons and caricatures on them by the cartoonists you met. The longer you stay away, the more paper you acquire. I was away for 18 days. For six of them, I was in Shrewsbury, England. A bit to the left on the map from Birmingham, and not far from the Welsh border and surrounded by the River Severn. Charles Darwin’s pretty big there - he was born, and went to school, in Shrewsbury. Curiously, so did Michael Palin. It is home to the world’s tallest Town Crier and the world’s first ironframe building. It’s also home to the third Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival. I arrived at the Lion Hotel 29 hours after taking off from Sydney, drenched (the heavens opened just as I stepped off the train from London). The town is full of preserved Tudor buildings and cobbled roads. I don’t know how many of you have been inside a Tudor building, but the hotel is around 300 years old and every single floorboard in the place creaked alarmingly (very funny at 2am). I had the honour of staying in the Dickens Suite (after famous hotel guest Charles Dickens) - everything was bent, crooked or just alarmingly jaunty, and every surface displayed a certain noticeable incline. Shrewsbury was, to be honest, a strange experience. Both James Kemsley and Dean Alston had arrived, as had Dave Gaskill who I had met in Perth in 1986, when I was just starting out in newspapers. My friend Petrina flew from Dublin to join me and one of the organisers of the Festival was the incomparable Bill Stott. Another welcome face was Adrian Sinnott who I had met at the Guinness Cartoon Festival in Ireland in 1997. So, with all these faces around me, it felt like I was on familiar soil. There just happened to be an awful lot of Poms in town!
www.cartoonists.org.au
Steve Panozzo with his “Shrewsbury Goes Large” large cartoon obviously inspired by a ladder (above) while young Seb Kemsley pushes his weight around with Shrewsbury’s resident Osama bin Laden impersonator (left).
The weekend kicked off on Thursday evening with an illustrated talk by architectural cartoonist (!) Louis Hellman MBE which was fascinating, but left us looking for a drink afterwards. Friday saw the start of the Festival proper, with a series of “how to” workshops for the general public. I got stuck into some on-the-spot caricaturing in the town square where I was joined by CCGB Chairman Terry Christien and the svelte Helen Martin. At the same time, Bill Stott, Noel Ford and Roger Penwill (among others) were getting started on their big cartoons - painting on giant boards in the square. You see, the theme for the weekend was “Shrewsbury Goes Large”. It was at this point that I started panicking about the cartoon I had to do.
The opening of “Degrees of Magnitude”, followed by supper, ended the day. Saturday was my day to get started on my big board, which ended up being a work of desperation. Not knowing what to expect, I was forced to steal paint from Bill Stott and ideas from Terry Christien. Kemsley “helped” by drawing Ginger Meggs on my board, but was content to play the tourist. The general public had a touch of weird about them. One chap came and stood quite close to me and pronounced, to noone in particular, “it’s not that funny up close”. He was probably right. The Saturday night buffet dinner featured Roger and Noel as “Beard”, a guitar duo specialising in Shadows tunes with a bit of Jimi Hendrix thrown in. They were later joined by air-guitar virtuoso Terry Christien. In the meantime, we all busied ourselves with drawing caricatures, as cartoonists do Petrina was a popular subject and ended up with a dozen or so caricatures to take home. Aha - more paper. Sunday featured a fascinating exhibition at the Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery by German cartoonist Peter Ruge, who makes his cartoons