The New Cartoonist Sep/Oct 2025

ISSN: 2977-6368

NUMBER 7 SEP/OCT 2025

READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH COVER STAR ROYSTON ROBERTSON

BORN TO DRAW

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£2.50

POLITICALLY SPEAKING WITH ADAM MACQUEEN

THE HERNE BAY FESTIVAL CARTOONS AT THE SEASIDE

LAW & ORDER A THEMED SELECTION

ROWSON MEETS ROWE CARTOONISTS SHARE A PINT

150 DIFFERENT CARTOONS INSIDE!

PLUS: N MARK WINTER ON SCHULZ N TNC MEETS A NEWBIE IN MY NEW BOSS N THE NEW ASHER PERLMAN BOOK N THE GREAT A.I TEST N PROPHETICAL MILDRED HOROSCOPES

CONTENTS PAGE 4

PALESTINE ACTION PAINTING

POLITICALLY SPEAKING WITH ADAM MACQUEEN

PAGE 12

HEAD LINES ROYSTON ROBERTSON PROFILE

PAGE 18

HERNE BAY CARTOON EXHIBITION

PAGE 22

ROWSON MEETS ROWE

PAGE 28

THE 3 S’S CONTIUED MARK WINTER ON SCHULZ

PAGE 36

AI CORNER WITH CHAT GPT

PAGE 38

LAW & ORDER CARTOON SPECIAL

PAGE 47

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

PAGE 48

ROYAL DRAWING SCHOOL

PAGE 52

MY NEW BOSS WITH WYNNIE KINSELLA

PAGE 56

PENS DOWN BOOK REVIEW

PAGE 58

THE CARTOON MUSEUM

PAGE 63

ANIMATION - DISNEY’S 9 OLD MEN

PAGE 64

HALLOWEEN CARTOONS

PAGE 70

THE DIRECTORY

PAGE 81

HOROSCOPES & CAPTION COMP

PAGE 82

PARTING SHOT WITH PETE SONGI

WANNA BE IN IT? GET IN TOUCH WITH YOUR COMMENTS, SUGGESTIONS AND CARTOONS AND WE WILL DO OUR BEST TO PUBLISH THEM!

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GET YOUR HOROSCOPES FROM PROPHETICAL MILDRED p81

ROWSON MEETS ROWE

SHARING PINTS IN NORTH LONDON

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LAW & ORDER CARTOONS! CHECK OUT ALL THE TOONS p42

Ed’s Welcome Hello there! And firstly apologies for my tardiness; life can sometimes get in the way of deadlines and it’s been very hectic for me recently, so I’m publishing this issue a little later than expected.

A lot has happened since the last issue, including an ISSUU renewal song & dance

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which turned into something akin to a really bad 80’s game show, the loss of my favourite pub, a birthday for The New Cartoonist, a new personal website, another Guardian toon, trips to Ramsgate, Richmond and Hogarth House in Hounslow and finally a broken toe. What japes!

NUMBER SEVEN

But enough about me and my toe woes...what’s in this bumper issue I hear you cry?

I mentioned a trip to Ramsgate, where I met up with the hugely talented Royston Robertson and watched his band in action - check out the brilliant cover!

We also have a peep behind the Private Eye walls with Adam Macqueen in ‘Politically Speaking’, and a look at all the fun down at the seaside in Herne Bay. Cartoon legend Martin Rowson meets fellow cartoon legend David Rowe for a pint, and Mark Winter further extends his three S’s series, exploring the incredible work of Charles Schulz.

There’s a trip to A.I. corner, and a great bunch of Law & Order cartoons in the centre-spread. My

local pub for cartoon exhibitions takes its final bow, and there’s a look at the Royal Drawing School’s 25th Anniversary Exhibition; The Power of Drawing.

Dy meets up with budding cartoonist Wynnie Kinsella, Asher Perlman’s new book gets a look in ‘Pen’s Down’, and the most accurate soothsayer in Greater London, Prophetical Mildred, returns with your horoscopes. Finally, there’s a tale of suits from yours truly in ‘Parting Shot’, and a fantastic portrait from the extremely talented Kevin Wells a.k.a SquiggleKing.

Enjoy!

EMAIL PETE THE EDITOR

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POLITICALLY SPEAKING

KEEPING A WATCHFUL EYE TNC PEEKS BEHIND THE PRIVATE EYE CURTAIN WITH SENIOR JOURNALIST ADAM MACQUEEN PETE SONGI poking and probing It seems these days a week can’t go by without another atrocity, or a Trump (Grandad’s got out again) comment causing global panic again.

As a political cartoonist it can be quite the challenge but what’s it like for someone working on a political magazine? Adam Macqueen is a Senior Journalist and Historian at Private Eye and he found sometime between deadlines to answer a few questions.

Where did it start for you and how did you get into journalism? think maybe this wasn’t just a sideline and I I spent the whole of my time at university determined to become an actor – appeared in endless plays, directed several, while incidentally writing a column for the student newspaper and getting elected to edit my college magazine.

Decided in the third year I definitely didn’t want to be an actor because it would involve a) being rejected at auditions, b) being out of work a lot and c) hanging round with actors, so for some reason decided to work in TV production instead but failed to get on the BBC training course. On a whim sent in of my columns from the student paper to Ian Hislop at Private Eye and asked if there was any chance of some work experience. Got it, then built up from there, pitched some feature ideas to the Big Issue and started writing a column for them too while I thought about what I was really going to do with my life. About six months to a year in mentioned to my friend and former editor on the student paper, who’d wanted to be a journalist since she was about 5 and was diligently doing her post-grad course, learning shorthand and doing shifts on newsdesks etc, that I was starting to

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was quite interested in journalism after all… at which point she said “finally, the penny fucking drops!” So I’d been working as a journalist for quite a while before I realised that was actually what I was.

You’re also an author – can you tell us a bit more about your creative writing?

Now that I was on to from a very early age – wrote my first “book” at four and threequarters years old, about a dragon who met a ghost which turned out to be his mother (Freudian twist). Then wrote and wrote and wrote throughout my childhood and teen years, including several half-finished and finally two completed novels that my agent (who’d taken me on for non-fiction books) pitched around but went unwanted. Finally I hit on the first of my thriller series centred around Tommy Wildeblood, a Piccadilly Circus rent boy who in 1976 finds himself drawn into the real-life attempt by the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe to murder his former boyfriend Norman Scott, and my publisher Eye/Lightning (no relation to Private Eye) jumped at it.

The second book, which sees Tommy get entangled with the IRA and the plot to bomb the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton in 1984, came out in 2022, and the third, the Inalienable Right, which weaves a fictional route through yet another real-life political scandal at the heart of Mrs Thatcher’s government in 1987, was published this year.

IN SITU! Adam at the Eye Offices

You are a senior journalist and historian at the Eye, so in a unique position to tell us the secret of Private Eye’s longevity. What do you feel is behind its survival since 1961?

Lots of things – it’s kept breaking really important and hard-hitting news stories while leavening the harshness of them with jokes and brilliant cartoons; it’s achieved a unique status in that there’s nothing else quite like it out there (the closest thing was Punch, which died decades ago); and the fact that Ian Hislop, unlike most other editors, was never conned into the idea that we should start giving away the contents for free online and thus become our own competitor and put ourselves out of business. Plus the fact that politics, both domestic and global, gets more and more mad and extreme by the year, which means we’re never short of copy, and readers are more and more desperate to find something to laugh about in it all. What surprised me, working on the two “official” books I’ve done on the mag (the history Private Eye: The First 50 Years and the compilation of scoops and spoofs The Sixty Yearbook) is how much it’s evolved over the years – it all happens very quietly so as not to alarm the readers, but the whole thing is unrecognisable from the 1990s version, let alone the 1960s era. The journalism, which was spearheaded by the magnificent Paul Foot who I was lucky enough to work with for a few years, is so much stronger and more comprehensive these days, and there’s just much much more of everything – including, I’m very pleased to say, cartoons!.

WITH ADAM MACQUEEN The front covers are an absolute joy.

How does that process come about?

They’re not just fun, they can make a difference of 20 or 30 thousand newsstand sales each fortnight – so they’re taken very seriously!

We go to press every second Monday, and Ian always has to think about which topics or figures in the news will still seem relevant by the end of the week – and through the week after, as well. There’s a whole group of joke writers who chuck in ideas, and several of them get made up as potential covers – before Ian, aided by the brilliant Nick Newman, makes the final decision quite late in the day. The other photo-bubbles don’t necessarily end up on the cutting room floor – they’re scattered through the jokes pages, or if there’s a particularly strong contender that just missed out you can usually find it in the top-right hand corner of page 7.

Insider secret there.

One of the funny things is that legendary and immediately recognisable as the photo bubble covers are, often the ones that do really well are the ones that do something completely different – so the Woman Has Baby for the birth of Prince George, or the completely blank cover headlined “Theresa May’s legacy in full” when she resigned… but maybe not the revolting overflowing toilet when Boris Johnson went.

That one was so horrible I had to store it face down because it made me feel sick..

You must get inundated with cartoons; how do you choose which ones to use? Purely humour, or do you have a set group of regular cartoonists?

I don’t usually get anywhere near them, that’s a job that Ian is delighted to keep to himself!

From the times I stand in when he’s on holiday and get to have the joy of placing the cartoons on the page, I can say that everything gets looked at, and brilliant ideas from newcomers are just as likely to get in as the many “old reliables”. There are loads of elements that go into it though – great jokes and/or beautiful drawings will always count for a lot, but you also can’t have all the topical jokes on the same subject, or a million caricatures of Keir Starmer per issue, so quite often several cartoons that are all easily good enough to be published will, quite unfairly from the cartoonists’ point of view, end up competing with each other. It’s the same with the journalism: you can only have so many stories about the Daily Mail in the Street of Shame section, however good they are, and a limited number of horrible deaths in the investigative In The Back pages before the readers would just get too depressed and upset. This is something I appreciate more since getting involved on the editing side than I ever did when my brilliant stories failed to make it onto the page!.

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When you look at the news do you ever feel like I do that at some point you’re going to wake up and find the adults back in the room? Great fodder for a satirical magazine, but do you also find it exhausting?

Yes, really exhausting. I went on holiday recently and made a pact with myself that I would only glance at the BBC news website headlines each day, read no newspapers, and delete social media from my phone. It was bliss. I worry about the news and get depressed like anyone else, only I have to absolutely steep myself in it for work. I find – and I don’t think this is a good thing, though it’s probably a necessary one – that I’ve developed a slightly psychopathic attitude to the news: I can separate myself and think: “well that’s a good story”, or “there’s something there for the Eye” rather than react like a normal person would, which would probably be to run round the kitchen screaming…

I’m not sure we’re ever getting the adults back, I’m afraid. Though I’ve reached the point where I’m now actually older than the last two prime ministers (thankfully not Keir), which leads to the horrible realisation that I’m one of the adults, and everyone else is just as hopelessly ill-equipped and clueless as I am..

The Eye is often the source of breaking news stories. That must bring its own set of challenges?

It does – especially when you’re breaking them, and no one notices until someone else puts them on their front page with EXCLUSIVE written on them! But there’s a satisfaction in banging on about things for years and seeing them finally break into the mainstream (see my colleague Richard Brooks’s work on the Post Office scandal, or the contaminated blood issue which the Eye first reported on in 1987. I can’t boast many like that to my name, but it’s been quite satisfying seeing stuff I revealed about phone hacking and the tabloids using dodgy private investigators as far back as 2006 turn up in the Leveson Inquiry, then the various criminal trials, and now the evidence in the case Prince Harry is bringing against the Daily Mail which is due to come to court next year!

You co-host the brilliant Private Eye podcast (Page 94). Do think extra content like this is now essential for printed publications to keep them relevant?

Hopefully the mag remains as relevant as ever, but hopefully stuff like the podcast and social media is helping point a new generation of readers in its direction. The figures apparently show we’re very popular with school and university-aged people,

ADAM DRAWS! A brilliant gag

though I’m not sure why! I really enjoy recording it, and I think my co-presenter Helen Lewis, who joined us a couple of years ago, is a superb addition to the magazine. She and Ian are just annoyingly clever and well-informed about every topic you might want to bring up. Actually, Andy is too. I’m just there for continuity giggles really.

What’s next for Adam Macqueen?

Well, I’ve got nine more stories on my list for the upcoming issue still to write, and it’s only Wednesday so I’d imagine I’ll have another nine at least to do by press day. The paperback of my collection of ghost stories, Haunted Tales, which I originally wrote as Christmas presents to friends and family, is out on October 9th, and the publisher Swift Press is very keen to see the follow-up, which I finished the first draft of in August, but I haven’t decided whether it’s good enough or not yet. And then it’s on with thriller number 4, which takes Tommy Wildeblood through to the early 1990s, and gets him involved with the hunt for a serial killer, with details, as ever, plucked from real life because I’m too lazy to make them up. So keeping quite busy!

Finally, here at TNC we believe at that everyone was born to draw. Could you draw us a political cartoon?

Political? Nah. But you can have an idea that’s been knocking around my head for about 20 years [above] and which I think proves I’m definitely a word man, not a picture person.

ADAM MACQUEEN

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NEWS & POLITICS

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HEAD LINES

A PORTRAIT OF ROYSTON ROBERTSON

A NICE LITTLE BIT OF R&R TNC CAUGHT UP WITH GAG CARTOONIST SUPREMO ROYSTON ROBERTSON

If you haven’t thumbed through the pages of Private Eye or The Spectator and not laughed out loud at a perfect Royston cartoon then look again!

Royston Robertson is a freelance cartoonist, originally from Catterick in North Yorkshire but now based in Kent.

Along with published works in political magazines Royston also illustrates the Times book Sir, The Year in Letters and has a regular gig in Skip & Waste magazine, something we should all aspire to.

He has been exhibited at the Chris Beetles Gallery in London and at the Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival, and if you can’t find him there then he can be found once a year making a mess in and around the Herne Bay Cartoon festival. (See p20) Royston is also part of a Ukulele group called Gaddzukes. Now that’s a busy guy!

Where did it all begin? Were you drawing and making art from an early age?

Yes, I think that’s the case with most cartoonists.

I was brought up in the Seventies on the DC Thomson and IPC comics and loved to draw all those characters. I produced my own comic called Ka-Pow! with a print run of two – one original and one barely legible carbon paper copy. One day I drew loads of Beano characters and sent them to Jim’ll Fix It, asking if he could arrange for me to be editor for a day. Thankfully, he never got back to me.

CARTOONIST IN SITU! Royston at his home office in Ramsgate

local papers in Walthamstow, in East London, then I became a sub-editor and moved to the Press Association, before working freelance shifts on many of the national papers and ending up with a staff job at The Times.

It became the main career in 2004 when The Times were looking for people to take voluntary redundancy. I couldn’t pass up the chance to get a buffer of money to allow me to pursue the cartooning dream. And, to quote Blind Lemon Pye in The Rutles mockumentary, “I’ve been starving ever since”.

Which cartoonists inspired you in the early Did you know you wanted to be a cartoonist days? from the outset, or did art sit alongside Other than the mostly uncredited cartoonists another job for a while? When did it become from The Beano, Whizzer & Chips and the your main career? like, it would have to be Gary Larson. I’d I always had thoughts of seen single-panel gag cartoons in being a cartoonist but passing, in Punch, TV Times, and never really saw it as other places, but it was The Far a serious option.

Side that really got me into the I trained to be a idea of drawing them. journalist after uni and the cartooning You’ve appeared in many sat alongside that publications including for many years, with Private Eye, The Spectator, me submitting gags Reader’s Digest, Saga, UK to magazines in my Greetings, BBC Magazines, spare time and getting OUP, HarperCollins, Faber the odd commission. I NOT JUST A CARTOONIST... & Faber, Law Society, Nursing worked as a reporter on Royston’s Ukulele group

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Standard and many more. Do you come up with a gag and immediately know what publication it would fit, or is it more of an ‘on demand’ process?

It’s both. Many of the clients you’ve mentioned were commissions, so I would be working to a brief. But with the on-spec market, Private Eye, The Spectator etc, it’s a question of coming up with the gags and sending them to most or all of the magazines in rotation, to see who bites.

Sometimes I will come up with an idea that I know could work for the Eye but the others wouldn’t touch. Although I’m often wrong, so I try to avoid second-guessing.

In your opinion, what’s the secret to a really good gag/political cartoon?

Ha, I wish I knew. I guess the joke is the thing.

There’s the old maxim of bad drawing being able to carry a great joke, but a great drawing won’t carry a bad joke. I think that’s broadly true. I generally prefer a cartoon that makes me laugh, rather than one that is just making a point. But if it can do both, that’s the ideal.

Everyone seems to be switching to iPad these days as it’s so quick and easy to use. I note you use it as well; do you miss getting your hands dirty? Do you think we are losing the knack of the ‘happy mistake’, and are wrong to have stopped churning out originals?

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HEAD LINES I’ve used an iPad for almost ten years and I can’t honestly say I miss the mess. And it’s just another drawing tool, so happy mistakes can happen. The trick is knowing when to leave them and to avoid the undo button.

I think the key is to keep it simple. A lot of people, including other cartoonists, have told me they thought I drew with pen and ink anyway.

That’s because I try not to use too many of the flashy features you get with digital. I decided I only wanted to go digital if it could emulate what I was doing with pen and ink. With gag cartooning, you have to come up with a lot of stuff, some of which may never see the light of day, so digital drawing helps with that, as it makes things quicker and more efficient.

ILLUSTRATING WORK! The Times book Sir, The Year in Letters

Editorial cartoons, especially those for print in national newspapers, seem to be diminishing at an alarming rate, and apart from national magazines which are extremely hard to get into like the Eye or Spectator, there seems to be a lack of homes for cartoons. (TNC aside). What advice do you have for anyone starting out in these uncertain times?

It’s a valid point and a good question. I’m not sure I have any advice. If anyone wants to give me any, I’m all ears. I would just say that if you really want to do cartooning, looking for markets is part of the job. They are out there but you probably have to look harder for them than ever before and even create them yourself.

You’re not just a great gag cartoonist – there’s another string to your bow, excuse the pun, in the form of music. You’re a member of the ukulele group Gaddzukes. That must be a lovely distraction from the day job?

Yeah, it’s great fun. The group is closely linked to Gadds’, the Ramsgate Brewery, which helps with the fun, and incredibly we’ve been going for more than 12 years now. During that time we have played four weddings and a funeral. That’s true, not a joke. And I think over the years we’ve had more than 50 members, which is giving The Fall a run for their money.

Finally - what’s next for Royston Robertson?

Lunch, I think...

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A PORTRAIT OF ROYSTON ROBERTSON

AT WORK!

ROYSTON ROBERTSON

Cartooning on the iPad

QUICK FIRE! FAVOURITE FILMS?

Today it’s Young Frankenstein.

“That’s Fronkensteen!”

FIRST CAR?

Secondhand Volvo 360. Or was it 460?

It was crap anyway.

MOST LOVED CUISINE?

AT PLAY!

Jamming with Gaddzukes

ROYSTON ROBERTSON

@roystoncartoons

Do fried egg sandwiches count as cuisine?

With HP of course.

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YOUR CHANCE TO WIN A SIGNED ROYSTON ROBERTSON COVER PRINT!

AN EVENING WALK ON A QUIET BEACH, OR THE BUSTLE OF LONDON?

I’m easy, when are you free, Pete?

PIECE OF EQUIPMENT YOU CAN’T DO WITHOUT WHEN CARTOONING?

The Apple Pencil, inevitably.

Oh, the hours I’ve spent looking for them in the clutter of my room.

You can’t just grab another HB. It’s definitely one of the drawbacks of digital!

UKULELE OR BANJO?

Simply email: editor@thenewcartoonist.co.uk subject: Royston Robertson print competition DEADLINE FOR ENTRIES OCTOBER 27TH 2025 Congratulations to Steve Hamson who was picked out of the hat from the last issue and gets a Rebecca Hendin signed cover print

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ENTER HERE NOW

Banjolele. Plays like a ukulele, sounds like a banjo.

It’s what George Formby used.

I don’t own one as they’re bloody loud and I don’t want to fall out with everyone in the house.

WHAT SUPER POWER WOULD YOU HAVE?

I’d be Ideas-Man. Lightbulb logo on the chest. “Thrill as he comes up with a batch of ten sellable cartoon gags in the blink of an eye!”

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ALL ROADS LEAD TO HB-FEST CARTOONISTS GATHERED FOR THE ANNUAL TRIP TO THE COAST FOR CARTOON FROLICS & FUN PETE SONGI getting paint everywhere

Image: Kasia Kowalska

It was that time of year again. A time to get on two rattlers and head to the seaside to greet, drink and paint outside with my fellow cartoonists!

This is never an easy trip, despite it being close to my nearest bit of coast in SE London the logistics of catching two trains, cases, equipment and the stress at the other end dragging it all a mile across a park and beyond can be a little troubling, however my wife makes the trip easier every year by booking ahead and keeping my stress head on it’s shoulders!

A PROPER WHYNGE! Cartoonists pose for the regular end of show shot

SATURDAY

First things first on arrival and it’s straight to Beach Creative, the focal point of the whole weekend now the venue has moved away from the Pier after a bit of controversy with the council a few years back.

Despite that lack of footfall The Beach Creative has become the true hub for the whole Exhibition and this year Mandy Troughton took up the reins while Sue Austen had a deserved break from proceedings. The best thing I can say about Mandy is the whole event went off without a hitch, a wonderful debut!

On to the ‘Out of Line’ exhibition at One Street Gallery where I caught sight of cartoonists amongst the many fantastic cartoons on display many who had braved the trip down on the Friday. Snacks, stories and Stellas where on hand and soon it was that time to hit our residence to check-in officially. I said earlier that my wife Dyana books ahead, in fact it’s the same place generally each year. The beautiful ‘Little Charles Lodge’ on Air BnB. After a mid-afternoon chat with Martin Rowson, Tom Johnston & Ben Chilton in The Pub pub it was time to hit Beach Creative again for the evening entertainment. Drink, Eat and draw on the tables and as the night draws to an end the very talented Royston Robertson as ever treats us all to his ukulele, who knew we knew so many songs. (Luckily the DVD is not available).

SUNDAY

My first job of the day is a gig. Yes, my weekly toon for The Mirror (Kevin Maguire) has to be

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completed before and paint is splashed. Luckily it’s a quick one.

As daunting as I find painting, I’ve learned preparation is key and this time I brought a board half started. A few hours later it was done, as where my fellow cartoonists as you can see opposite in various images captured from a couple of wonderful days down at the seaside.

Now where’s that Pub Pub again?

ONE NEW STREET MEET UP! Cartoonists arrive on the Saturday for launch...

CARTOONISTS AT THE SEASIDE DRINK & DRAW! Saturday night table drawings...

OUTSIDE INFLUENCES Wilbur & Birchy having a giggle...

WHERE TO NEXT? Cartoonists contemplating a new drinking venue...

FULL OF CHARACTER...

Capturing the punters!

ON FULL DISPLAY! Walls at One New Street.

SUNDAY EARLY BIRDS!

IN FULL FLOW...

Banx hard at it...

PROMISES!

PAINTING WITHIN THE LINES Des Buckley in full concentration...

SKIPPING THE WASHING UP! A sculpture made from steel scourers.

INTERESTED!

DELICATELY POISED! John Landers & Chris ‘Dink’ Williams

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WE’VE FINISHED IT! Amy Amani & Clive Goddard QUICK... THE ROZZERS! Martin Rowson’s attempt at not getting arrested.

THE FINISHING LINE In the Pub Pub afterwards...

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CARTOONISTS GO FOR A PINT

ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD

CARTOON KING MARTIN ROWSON POPS INTO A BOOZER IN HAMSPTEAD TO MEET DAVID ROWE Weirdly, I’ve always enjoyed the company of cartoonists (even though, over 40 years ago when I started out, it was more or less compulsory that we all had to hate each other, for reasons ranging from fear and envy to god knows what)..

Anyway, I’ve been particularly lucky to have spent time hanging around with cartoonists in India, France, Turkey, the US, Canada and lots of other places, and it’s always both a pleasure and oddly fulfilling.

So I was delighted when the revered Australian cartoonist David Rowe contacted me earlier in the year, via one of the social meejah platforms, to ask if I’d be up for a pint while he was in London over the summer.

We’d never previously caught up, and had only had cursory conversations online, but when we met in late July in The Flask in Hampstead (which was a convenient midway point for both of us) we quickly established we were big fans of each other, which always helps.

In case you don’t know, Dave is a multi-award winning editorial cartoonist for the Australian Financial Review. Despite its title, this is a rare left of centre paper in a media environment PINTS CARTOONISTS & CRISPS! dominated by Rupert Murdoch, which in consequence tends to veer to the other end of A recipe for a long afternoon in Hampstead the political spectrum. Sound familiar?

Murdoch’s “The Australian was denounced by As we chatted over several pints and packets Murdoch “The Australian” as antisemitic. of crisps, Dave described how several of his It seems the pirate hat worn by the (as it colleagues, starting off on the left, abandoned happens, but irrelevantly) Jewish Finance all principles once they started working for Minister looked exactly like a yarmulke. This all Murdoch and found themselves peddling the sounded very, very familiar, though in Dave’s proprietorial line. He also told me (which I hadn’t case the minister in question quickly contacted previously been aware of) about the row that him to say it was all nonsense. Nonetheless, erupted after a cartoon he’d drawn of the then he felt sick with anxiety and shame while the Australian Finance Minister as a pirate digging right-wing press stirred the shit, even if, when he up buried treasure. This was denounced by visited the Australian Jewish Museum in an act of atonement, the staff immediately greeted him with joy, saying he was their favourite cartoonist.

Maybe it’s the same the whole world over. These days, almost always rightly, Dave and I need to tread with much greater care than hitherto, especially with our heel-clicking colleagues in the oligarch press constantly on the case.

Still, we spent a delightful couple of hours together. One of the things I was eager to establish was that we are not, in fact, the same person, despite our work being ascribed to each other fairly frequently in the Internet’s cesspit of stupidity. There is, of course, the similarity in our surnames. There’s

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also a passing resemblance in our mutual styles. Sure enough, Dave is in the Great British Tradition, established by Hogarth and Gillray and continued up to today by Giles, Steve Bell and the rest of us, of filing the canvas. But I was surprised when he said he spends most time on the Financial Review on his caricature portraits.

For obvious reasons, these have little valency outside Australia as nobody else knows who these people are (always the most important consideration in caricature). Anyway, he told me that after he’s done one of them, he then relaxes for a couple of hours tossing out the editorial stuff. In which case... wow!

Just search Rowe’s work out online, and stand back in awe and wonder at what he does to Trump. This is Gillravianly great, political cartooning which attains the sublime in its viciousness. Again, outside the world of Australian politics, we may lose some of the immediate journalist punch, so just bask in his palette, his composition and his line. Pure joy, as was the brief session in the pub I spent with one of the world’s truly great cartoonist. Best of all, it turns out after a few pints we share - at least the same self-satisfied shit eating smirk.

MARTIN ROWSON

DAVID ROWE

THE WONDERFUL WORK OF DAVID ROWE Cartoonist for the Australian Financial Review https://www.afr.com

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DO YOU WANT TO BECOME A MEMBER OF THE PCO?

WHAT IS THE PCO?

Our title pretty much gives the game away: we’re an organisation for, erm, professional cartoonists. We considered Professional Political & Gag Cartoonists’ and Caricaturists’ Organisation…but not for long.

WHAT DOES IT DO?

The PCO promotes the work of its members and champions the cartooning arts across the board and around the world. We organise and support exhibitions and festivals.

We also stand up for, and have campaigned on behalf of oppressed artists.

All before breakfast.

HOW DO I JOIN?

The majority of your earnings need to come from cartooning and/or caricaturing.

Then you can send samples of your work or links to a website/social media platform to the esteemed Andrew Birch here: pcomembership@gmail.com

BENEFITS! You get a badge!

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THE THREE S’s (EXTENDED) A CARTOON ICON SERIES

THE CHARLIE SCHULZ EFFECT

A LOOK AT THE ULTIMATE KING OF THE CARTOON STRIP GENRE, THE CREATOR OF PEANUTS MARK WINTER reflecting Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, “Where have I gone wrong.” Then a voice says to me, “This is going to take more than one night.” Charles M. Schulz.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest cartoonists of the Twentieth Century, Charles Schulz wrote and illustrated ‘Peanuts’ for fifty years, considered the single most popular and influential comic strip in the world. He is cited as a major influence by many. Bill Watterson, the creator of ‘Calvin and Hobbs’ is one of them. In a tribute piece written for the ‘Los Angeles Times’ (Dec. 21, 1999) entitled ‘Drawn Into a Dark but Gentle World’ after Charles announced his retirement, he wrote, “Comic-strip cartooning requires such a peculiar combination of talents that there are very few people who are ever successful at it. Of those, Charles M. Schultz is in a league all his own.

Schulz reconfigured the comic-strip landscape and dominated it for the last half of its history.

One can scarcely overstate the importance of ‘Peanuts’ to the comics, or overstate its influence on all of us who have followed.

Drawn with a crow quill-type pen dipped in ink, Schulz’s line work has character in its quirky velocity and pressure, unlike the slick, uniform lines of today’s markers and technical pens.

‘Peanuts’ could never be drawn by anonymous assistants as so many other strips were and are-its line is inimitable. The strip looks simple.

But Schulz’s sophisticated choices reveal a deep understanding of cartooning’s strengths.”

Charles himself believed that the key to cartooning was to take out the extraneous details and leave in only what’s necessary. He named a few early cartoonists as influences, including Milton Caniff, Bill Mauldin, George Herriman, Roy Crane, Elzie C, Segar and Percy Crosby, but his authorized biographer, Rheta Grimsley Johnson

HAND DRAWN MAESTRO

here goes! (‘Good Grief: the Story of Charles M. Schulz,’ 1989) commented, “It would be impossible to narrow down three or two or even one direct THE BEGINNING influence on (Schulz’s) personal drawing style.

Charles Monroe ‘Sparky’ Schulz was born in The uniqueness of ‘Peanuts’ has set it apart Minneapolis, Minnesota on November 26, for years. That one-of-a-kind quality permeates 1922. He grew up in the State Capital St. Paul. every aspect of the strip and very clearly extends The only child of Carl, a barber and Dena, of to the drawing. It is purely his with no clear German and Norwegian descent. His uncle forerunners and no subsequent pretenders.” nicknamed him ‘Sparky’ after the horse, ‘Spark Commenting on the success of the strip and the Plug’ in Billy DeBeck’s comic strip ‘Barney travails of the “little round-headed kid,” she said, Google’, which Charles loved to read. Sparky “Losing is what kept ‘Peanuts’ living. How many initially disliked the name, but it remained people besides Charles M.Schulz made a fortune with him for life. Throughout his youth Charles sympathizing with losers?” As Charlie Brown’s and his father shared a Sunday morning ritual, sister Sally said, “Daytime is so you can see where reading the funnies. He was fascinated with you’re going. the strips, especially Nighttime is so ‘Skippy’, ‘Mickey you can lie in bed Mouse’ and ‘Popeye’ worrying.” On the He always wanted to 25th anniversary be a cartoonist. “It of his passing, seems beyond the it may take comprehension of more than one people that someone night to ponder can be born to draw where Charles comic strips, but I think I may have gone was,” he said. In his short wrong, but an Charles Schulz bio in awful lot longer ‘Laughing Matters’ Phil to discuss where Callaway wrote “School he went right. was tough for Sparky.

Not enough His favourite subjects pages will do were recess and lunch. it justice...but He failed every single SCHULZ IN HIS STUDIO

RHETA GRIMSLEY JOHNSON BOOK

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THE FIRST PUBLISHED STRIP

subject in eighth grade. High school was no better. He flunked Algebra, English, Latin and Physics. In fact, to this day he holds the record for the lowest Physics marks in his school. Sports weren’t much of an improvement. He made the school’s golf team, but his poor play cost his team the championship. Sparky was a loser when it came to friendships too. No one seemed to notice him. He was astonished if a classmate said hello. Afraid of rejection, he never asked a girl out. Instead, he devoted himself to the one thing he really enjoyed: drawing cartoons.

No one thought they were any good, but that didn’t stop him. By the time he was a senior at high school, he got up the nerve to submit some cartoons to the yearbook staff. They were rejected.”

After graduating, Charles wrote to the Walt Disney Studios about job prospects. He received a form letter requesting samples of his work. It asked him to draw a cartoon of “a man repairing a clock by shovelling the springs and gears back inside it.” He did the cartoon and sent it back, hoping for a positive reply. Another rejection.

In 1937, Charlie drew a picture of his pet dog Spike, who ate unusual things like pins and tacks and sent it to ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not!’. His drawing appeared in Robert Ripley’s nationally syndicated newspaper feature with the caption,”A hunting dog that eats pins, tacks and razor blades is owned by C.F. Schulz, St Paul, Minn and drawn by Sparky.” Success at last. Encouraged by his mother, after seeing a ‘Do you like to draw?’ ad, he completed a correspondence cartoon course with the Federal School of Applied Cartooning.

EXPERIENCES

EARLY VERSION

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The Charles M. Schulz Museum’s biography states that “Two monumental events happened within days of each other in 1943 that profoundly affected the rest of Schulz’s life; his mother, to whom he was very close, passed away at age 50 from cervical cancer and he boarded a troop train to begin his army career in Camp Campbell, Kentucky. Though Schulz remained proud of his achievements and leadership roles in the army for the rest of his life, this period of time haunted him with dual experiences of the loss of his mother and realities of war.”

He was assigned to Company B in the Eighth Armoured Battalion of the Twentieth Armoured Infantry Division, and trained as a machine gunner, rising to the rank of staff sergeant. His unit saw action in Europe in February 1945, where he helped lead the charge on Munich and liberate the Dachau concentration camp.

After Germany’s surrender, Charles received the Combat Infantryman Badge for fighting in active ground combat under hostile fire. According to one story, he once refused to toss a grenade into an artillery emplacement because he saw a little dog wander into it. He returned home from the war in the fall of 1945, moving in with his father in an apartment above Carl’s barbershop, “determined to realize his passion of becoming a professional cartoonist.” He got a job as an instructor for his old art correspondence school, which had changed its name to ‘Art Instruction Inc’ and then freelanced for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Saturday Evening Post. He created a strip based on child characters called ‘Li’l Folks’ in 1947, attributed to his childhood nickname ‘Sparky’, featuring prototypes of the soon-to-be iconic characters Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

He also had the first of 17 cartoons published in ‘The Saturday Evening Post’. After many failed attempts Charles finally persuaded United Feature Syndicate to purchase the strip.

However, the publishing company editors said it sounded too much like the very popular ‘Li’l Abner’ and ‘Little Folks’ strips. They came up with ‘Peanuts’, much to Charles dismay, a name inspired by the peanut gallery featured on the ‘Howdy Doody’ TV show. In a 1987 interview with Frank Pauer in the ‘Dayton Daily News and Journal Herald Magazine’ Charles explained, “They asked me to think of another title. I couldn’t think of one and somebody at

United Feature came up with the miserable title ‘Peanuts’, which I hate and always have hated.

It has no dignity and it’s not descriptive. What could I do? Here I was, an unknown kid from St. Paul.” The name stuck, forever. “It really does not matter what you are called,” Charles said later in life, “or where your work is placed, as long as it brings some kind of joy to some person, someplace. To create something out of nothing is a wonderful experience. To take a blank piece of paper and draw characters that people love and worry about is extremely satisfying.”

‘Peanuts’ made its official debut as a daily strip in seven newspapers, on October 2, 1950, including Charlies hometown paper, the ‘Minneapolis Star’. It was four panels long and showed Charlie Brown walking by two other young children, Shermy and Patty. The anthropomorphic beagle Snoopy, partially inspired by one of his childhood hound, Spike, first appeared in the third strip and was named a month later. The first Sunday strip appeared on January 6, 1952 in the half-page format.

On the day it first appeared back in 1952, a friend of Charles visited a news stand in uptown Minneapolis, asking if any of the newspapers carried ‘Peanuts’, to which the newsdealer replied, “No, and we don’t have any popcorn either,” which confirmed Charles’ fears about the title. Asked what he did for a living, he avoided mentioning the title. “I do a comic strip with Snoopy in it, Charlie Brown and his dog.”

Charles decided to produce all aspects of the strip himself from script to finished art and lettering and the colouring process. ‘Peanuts’ is known for its deliberate, simple and repetitive art style. “Everything in ‘Peanuts’ happens on a flat plane, which is the way a child draws,” Charles explained. “This is not a crazy business about slinging ink. This is a deadly serious business.” Charles had a lifelong hatred of travel.

He only took one vacation in the fifty years producing the strip (apparently under orders from United Feature Syndicate), a five-week break in late 1997, celebrating his 75th birthday.

Reruns appeared during his vacation, the only time that occurred during Charles’ lifetime. ‘It is one of the few situations in my life where I feel totally secure. When I sit behind the drawing board I feel that I am in control,” he said.

MEANING

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THE THREE S’s (EXTENDED) A CARTOON ICON SERIES

SNOOPY EVOLUTION

French-American comics historian Maurice Horn, the editor of ‘The World Encyclopedia of Comics’, wrote that ‘Peanuts’ focused on a social circle of young children, “Where adults exist, but are typically unseen but occasionally ‘heard’ conversing from just outside the frame by voice bubbles. But, as Charles always pointed out, “It’s not a strip for children.” Bill Watterson commented on this in his Los Angeles Times tribute, “For a ‘kid strip’ with ‘gentle humour,’ it shows a pretty dark world, and I think this is what makes the strip so different from, and so much more significant than, other comics. Only with the inspired surrealism of Snoopy does the strip soar into silliness and fantasy.” Art historian David Kunzle’s article, ‘The first half of the 20th century: the evolution of the form’ in the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’, discussing the development of the US newspaper comic strip said, “The literate strip with philosophical, psychological and sociological overtones was the principal innovation of the later 1950s and highlighted ‘Peanuts’ as “arguably the most successful and the most translated gag strip

BATTLING THE RED BARON

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ambition, weakness, gullibility, bravery, fearfulness, tyranny, kindness. A character as complex as Macbeth could only be created by someone with a complete understanding of what it means to be a human being and suggests that Shakespeare himself shared many traits with his most famous literary character. In the same way, the characters in ‘Peanuts’ reflect the multiple dimensions of their creator.

Interviewers asked Schulz if he was really Charlie Brown, expecting perhaps, an uncomplicated confirmation. But Schulz was all the characters in ‘Peanuts’ - Charlie WHO’S WHO? Brown, Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, ever.” It helped cement the four-panel gag strip Pigpen, Franklin, Peppermint Patty, Marcie, even Snoopy. Each character represented a as the standard in the United States and would go on to become the most successful comic strip different aspect of Schulz, making ‘Peanuts’ perhaps the most richly layered autobiography in history. Charlie’s competition on the comics of all time.” And as cultural historian Robert page were action strips, family dramas and the hillbilly satire ‘Li’l Abner’. The reduced size of his Thompson claimed, “The longest story ever told by one human being.” Charles’ wife, Jeannie strip was its prime selling point’ United Feature confirmed this when she once said, “He’s crabby Syndicate promoted ‘Peanuts’ as “The Greatest like Lucy, diffident like Charlie Brown. There’s Little Sensation Since Tom Thumb.” a lot of Linus...philosophical and wondering The stock main ‘everyman’ character, Charlie about life. Like Schroeder, he loved classical Brown, who shows dogged determination music, preferring Brahms to Beethoven and like in the face of constant defeat, is awkward, Snoopy, he was a war buff.” nervous, meek, deeply sensitive and lacks selfconfidence. A constant failure, he is unable to SNOOPY successfully fly a kite, win a ballgame, or kick a football held by his irascible friend Lucy Van Pelt, Charlie Brown and Snoopy were both ranked eighth on TV Guide’s 50 Greatest Cartoon who always pulls it away at the last moment.

But he became the symbol of optimism, typified Characters of All Time, but it was Snoopy’s popularity that increased, eclipsing his owner. in his quote, “Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in The wise but weird pooch quickly became a Australia.” Charles named him after a colleague fan favourite and rocketed to international stardom. His early design was simple small working at ‘Art Instruction Inc’, whose full name was Charlie Francis Brown. The question is often beagle, but with Charles’ artistic style evolving, so did Snoopy, first standing upright on his hind asked, is Charlie Brown based on Schulz legs in January 9, 1956. As the strip himself? His emotionally sensitive progressed, Snoopy underwent and depressed behaviour appears several transformations from a to draw from Charles’ own loyal, silent pet to a multichildhood experiences. In a dimensional canine, a 1968 interview he replied mixture of innocence and to that question. “I think of egotism (full name, Snoopy myself as Charles Schulz.

Von Peanuts, reflecting But if someone wants to his playful and sometimes believe I’m really Charlie aristocratic nature) with a Brown, well, it makes a good far more human-like and story.” expressive personality... or in Jeff Kinney (‘Diary of his case, personalities, creating a Wimpy Kid’), writing the various alter egos, pretending SCHULZ - A TRUE STAR introduction to Chip Kidd’s to be someone ‘world famous’ comprehensive 2015 book ‘Only but failing, as a writer, a surgeon, What’s Necessary: Charles M.Schulz a lawyer, a secret agent, a tennis pro, the and the Art of Peanuts’, revealing a behind shades-wearing Joe Cool or most famously, in -the -scenes tour of Schulz’s genius, said, October 1965, donning stylish aviator goggles “In creating Macbeth, William Shakespeare and a scarf, he ‘become’ a daring First World embodied a single character with a full and War Flying Ace, surviving endless imaginative often contradictory range of human traitsdogfights with his nemesis, the infamous, but

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pic by @brennanspark

unseen German fighter pilot, Red Baron, (based the only member of on the real-life wartime legend Manfred von the group to believe Richthofen) on top of a Sopwith Camel bi-plane, in the unseen ‘Great disguised as Snoopy’s iconic red doghouse, Pumpkin’, an alternative which is constantly ‘shot down’. Charles said, Santa Claus-like “Snoopy has to retreat into his fantasy world in figure, who appears order to survive. Otherwise he leads a kind of every Halloween dull, miserable life. I don’t envy dogs, the lives bearing gifts.” Linus they have to live.” Then Snoopy, sitting atop first appeared in the of his doghouse with his typewriter may have strip on September had something to say about his creator. “All his 19, 1952, after being life he tried to be a good person. Many times, referred to two months however, he failed. For after alL, he wasn’t a dog.” earlier. He spoke his Snoopy imagines he can speak, but never first words in 1954, actually does. His very articulate thinking is holding his blue blanket and sucking shown in thought balloons, but he does make his thumb for psychological security. The idea numerous nonverbal sounds such as growls, of his ‘security blanket’ originated from Charles’ yelps, crying and laughter. His dialogue is not own observations of his first three children, heard by the other human characters who carried around blankets. He described Only his best friend, Woodstock can Linus’s blanket as “profoundly the single best understand him. The small, yellow thing that I ever thought of,” and was bird of an unknown species pleased about its versatility for and poor flying skills was visual humour and proud that introduced on March 4, the phrase ‘security blanket’ 1966, but not named entered the dictionary. Charlie until June 22, 1970, Brown’s infatuation with after the previous year’s the ‘Little Red-Haired Girl’, Woodstock Rock Festival, an unseen character and which had a logo showing ‘symbol of unrequited love’ a bird perched on a guitar. was first mentioned in the Woodstock speaks in a strip on November 19, 1961. ‘chirping language’ depicted She was based on a former in the strip as ‘chicken scratch’ co-worker at Art Instruction, Inc, marks that only Snoopy and his Donna Mae Wold (nee Johnson) who RARE SELF other bird friends can understand. worked in accounts. They dated for CARICATURE about three years and when Charles proposed in June 1950, she turned him LUCY down, because she was engaged to someone In an interview with ‘Psychology Today’, Charles else! “What a bitter blow,” he sighed. While not said his favourite ‘Peanuts’ characters were in the strip, she appears in several TV specials as Snoopy, Linus and Charlie Brown. His least Heather Wold. The freckled tomboy Peppermint favourite was the abrasive and self-righteous Patty, who joined the ‘Peanuts’ gang on August Lucy. “I don’t especially like her, that’s all.” TIME magazine described her as CharlieBrown’s chief 22, 1966 was inspired by Patricia Swanson, a cousin on his mother’s side. Charles described tormentor… “a tiny, black-haired termagant.” her as forthright and loyal with a “devastating Like most of his creations, Lucy is based on a real person, in this case an eccentric, narcissistic singleness of purpose.” She calls Charlie Brown ‘Chuck’. Her bookish and wisecracking buddy, woman called Louanne Van Pelt, who, along Marcie addresses Patty as ‘Sir’. She is modelled with her husband sometimes played bridge with Charles during the time he was developing on Elise Gallaway, a roommate of Patty Swanson.

The Beethoven-obsessed, toy piano-playing the strip. As one can imagine, Mrs Van Pelt and prodigy, object of Lucy’s desire, Schroeder her clan were not best pleased with this ‘cruel’ depiction and I imagine the card games ceased... played his way into the strip on May 30, 1951. He was named after a young boy who Charles used or became more intense. One of her more to caddy with at Highland Park golf course in St memorable quotes sums up Lucy’s character, “I Paul. never made a mistake in my life. I thought I did Charles didn’t often let public opinion dictate once, but I was wrong.” Lucy’s younger brother, the choices he made in the strip, but when Linus and Charlie Brown’s cerebral sidekick was named after Charles’ good friend, the American Harriet Glickman, a white, Jewish Los Angeles schoolteacher wrote to him eleven days after the cartoonist and puzzle designer, Linus Maurer.

“Linus, my serious side, is the house intellectual; assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., urging him to consider incorporating characters of bright, well-informed which, I suppose, colour. “It could help change the vast sea of may contribute to his feelings of insecurity,” misunderstanding, fear, hate and violence,” she Charles said. “He is the strip’s philosopher and wrote, asking herself what she could do to help theologian, often quoting Holy Scripture and

DISPLAY OF PAPERBACKS at CMS museum currently part of the 75th anniversary exhibition at the museum

change those conditions in our society which led to such a tragic outcome.

FRANKLIN

Since ‘Peanuts’ was launched in the 1950s there was very little representation of black communities in comic strips. Charles was unsure how to approach the issue and didn’t want to appear patronising with tokenism, but Harriet thought the addition of an African American character would help normalise the idea of friendship between children of different ethnicities. United Feature Syndicate people voiced reservations that some papers might drop the strip in protest, but Charles’ threat of quitting softened their stance. On July 30, 1968 the strips first African American, Franklin appeared, as a schoolfriend of Peppermint Patty and Marcie, picking up Charlie Brown’s lost beach ball and building a sandcastle together Charles described Franklin as “thoughtful and can quote the old Testament as effectively as Linus. In contrast with the other characters, Franklin has the fewest anxieties or obsessions and is never too busy to help his friends.” In 1970 he said that he had wanted to introduce a black character for some time...the reaction was tremendous. We got quite a stack of mail saying,”Thank you.” However not all the correspondence was supportive. In a 1997 interview, Charles discussed a letter he had received from a Southern editor remarking on a strip I had done showing Franklin sitting in front of Peppermint Patty. “I don’t mind you having a black character, but please don’t show them in school together,” it requested.

There are over 70 distinct characters in ‘Peanuts’, including some weird ones. “My name is 555 95472, but everyone calls me 5 for short… I have two sisters names 3 and 4.” With these words, Charles introduced (on September 30, 1963) one-in fact three of the quirkiest characters in the ‘Peanuts’ universe, the numerically-monikered 95472 siblings... albeit briefly, offering some memorable bits of satirical nonsense. As 5 explains to Lucy, “My dad is disturbed by all the numbers being put

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HOLD THE FRONT PAGES

on us these days so he changed our names to numbers…” It was a way for Charles to vent his displeasure at the creation of ZIP Codes, introduced in 1963 and 95472 was his ZIP Code and 5’s surname.

The first ‘Peanuts’comic books were published in the 1950s and initially featured strip reprints, United Feature Syndicate began licensing the characters for use in comic books in order to expand the market. When Dell Publishing gained the rights to distribute ‘Peanuts’ in comic-book format during the mid-to-late 1950s they also began commissioning original stories to be printed. Charles had enough on his plate producing the daily strip and provided very little original work, handing the comic book responsibilities to his friend and associate Jim Sasseville. When he left in 1959, Charles other associates Dale Hale and Tony Pocrnick replaced him until they also left. Dell then began using in-house artists and writers, which were notable for deviating greatly from Charles’ original works. Charles, did however still provide covers for all issues titled ‘Peanuts’. In 1962, Gold Key Comics took control over Dell’s properties and used their own staff to continue stories until 1964. It wasn’t until Kaboom! Studios acquired a license in the 2010s that ‘Peanuts’ comics reappeared with a mixture of classic strips and new stories in individual graphic novels. The very popular pocket-sized ‘Peanuts’ paperbacks, featuring reprints of the published strips were initially published in 1952 by Rinehart & Co, Inc., (later by the merged group, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.) and the Fawcett Crest editions, published from the early 1960s through to the 1990s. In 2013, Fantagraphics published ‘The Complete Peanuts’, a series of 26 books containing all the strips chronologically. An exhibition at the Charles M.Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, entitled ‘Peanuts Paperbacks’ has just concluded, after a six month run.

FRONT COVERS

‘Peanuts’ characters have also appeared on numerous magazine covers, most notably the

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which aired on December 9, 1965, winning an Emmy for ‘Outstanding Children’s Programme’ and a nomination for Charles’ writing. The most recent is ‘Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical’ on Apple TV+ on August 15 this year.

The ‘Charlie Brown Thanksgiving’ short, that screened on CBS, November 20, 1973 was nominated for two Emmys with Charles winning for ‘Outstanding Individual Achievement in Children’s Programming.’ Charles wrote or co-wrote the TV specials and carefully oversaw their production. Five feature films have been produced. The first, ‘A Boy Named Charlie Brown’ was released in December, 1969 and the latest ‘A Peanuts Movie’ in 2015.

‘Your A Good Man, Charlie Brown’, a 1967 stage musical premiered Off-Broadway at Theatre 80, featuring M*A*S*H star Gary Burghoff as Charlie Brown with 1,597 performances. It transferred to London’s West End in February, 1968 at the Fortune Theatre.

A Broadway production opened at the John Golden Theatre on June 1, 1971 and a revised version at the Ambassador Theatre in 1999, winning two Tony Awards for Kristin Chenoweth as Sally and Roger Bart as Snoopy.

In 1975 ‘Snoopy: The Musical’ premiered at the Little Fox Theatre in San Francisco and OffBroadway at the Lamb’s Theatre in December 1982 at the West End Duchess Theatre the following year. There is also a stage version of ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’, developed in 2013.

April 9, 1965 TIME and March 17, 1967 LIFE issues. A Letter from The Publisher of TIME stated… “The Peanuts chronicle has become world famous, and its harried nonhero is beloved by all who follow his tribulations.

TIME’s reporters talked to comic-strip artists, psychologists, educators and others who take the comics fairly seriously, seeking to find out was is afoot in the land of the funnies. The final choice fell to Charles Schulz’s ‘Peanuts’, which stands out among the newer strips as probably the funniest and certainly the most existential. Schulz, a 20-year TIME subscriber, declared himself awed by the choice, but overcame his awe sufficiently to draw for the cover the group portrait of his characters...

THE FINAL FRONTIER catching Charlie in one of his rare happy NASA contacted Charles in 1968 with a request moments-delighted no doubt that he finally to use Snoopy as their safety mascot. The Silver made it.” In the accompanying article they Snoopy Award programme was instituted to conclude that “Comics have espoused many improve the safety record of employees and causes; the strips have been crammed with contractors and continues to this day. The all kinds of propaganda. But Peanuts is the Silver Snoopy pin is a much-coveted award. The leader of a refreshing new breed that takes an black and white communications cap carrying unprecedented interest in the basics of life. an audio headset, worn since 1968 by Love, hate, togetherness, solitude, Apollo, Skylab and Space Shuttle the alienation in an age of astronauts is referred to as a anxiety-such topics are so ‘Snoopy Cap’. deftly explored by Charlie The flight of Apollo Brown and the rest of the 10 in May 1969 was a peanuts crew that readers ‘dress rehearsal’ for the who would not sit still first lunar landing two for a sermon readily months later, when Neil devour the sermon-like Armstrong and Buzz cartoons.”

Aldrin walked on the ‘Peanuts’ has been moon. The call signs for adapted into feature the command (CM) and and educational films, lunar (LM) modules were television specials and ‘Charlie Brown’ and ‘Snoopy’ shows, musical theatre, a web DOGS IN SPACE respectively. Both characters series, commercials and video became semi-official mascots and games and contemporary multi-media platforms. There has also been more than thirty Charles provided NASA with mission-related artwork. Commander Thomas Stafford and LM documentary specials produced. pilot Eugene Cernan took ‘Snoopy’ to within Over fifty TV Specials have been produced, 50,000 feet of the lunar surface and on the way beginning with ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas,’

CHARLIE BROWN EVOLUTION

back to earth the CM pilot John Young put his foot down resulting in ‘Charlie Brown’ setting the speed record-39,897.25 km per hour, the fastest humans have ever travelled. The capsule can be seen today at London’s Science Museum where it has been on loan from the Smithsonian Institute since 1976. The LM ascent stage of ‘Snoopy’ is still silently orbiting the sun.

Charles was an avid fan of ice sports, especially figure skating and ice hockey, which often featured in the strip. He built and owned the Redwood Empire Ice Arena in 1969, commonly known as ‘Snoopy’s Home Ice’ near his studio in Santa Rosa, California. He was active in senior ice hockey tournaments and “for his immense contribution to growing the game of hockey,” Charles was awarded the Lester Patrick Award in 1981 by US Hockey was inducted into the US Hockey Hall of Fame in 1993. The Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Centre was built over the road from the ice rink, opening on August 15, 2002, “dedicated to an exploration of the artist’s life and work… a mecca for ‘Peanuts’ fans the world over.” There is also the world’s only satellite to the California-based original, the Snoopy Museum in Tokyo and the Camp Snoopy attraction at Knott’s Berry Farm.

RETIREMENT

After suffering several small strokes and a blocked aorta in November 1999, Charles was diagnosed with colon cancer that had spread.

The effects of this and the chemotherapy left him partially blind in one eye and unable to read or draw. He announced his retirement on December 14. It was a difficult decision for Charles. In his last interview with Al Roker on ‘The Today Show’, he said, “I never dreamed that this would happen to me. I always had the feeling that I would probably stay with the strip until I was in my early eighties. But all of a sudden it’s gone. It’s been taken away from me.” He had delt with the concept of death in the strip. Linus asks Charlie Brown,”After you’ve died, do you get to come back? He replies, “If they stamp your hand.” Charles was asked previously, if Charlie Brown would finally get to kick the football after fifty years of attempting to do so while Lucy was holding it in his final strip, Charles responded, “Oh, no. Definitely not...that would be a terrible disservice to him after nearly half a century.” In ‘The Today Show’ interview he did recount the moment when signing his last strip, teary eyed, “All of a sudden I thought, that poor kid, he never got to kick the football. What a dirty trick.”

The last ‘Peanuts’ daily strip ran on Monday 3 January, consisting of Snoopy sitting on top of his doghouse with his typewriter. It was accompanied by a note from Charles, officially announcing his retirement and thanking his

readers. The life of ‘Peanuts’ and Charles Schulz were completely intertwined. “the strip and he were one,” said ‘Mutts’ cartoonist Patrick McDonnell.

The final ‘Peanuts’ Sunday strip, which appeared on 13 February, 2000, turned into a poignant epitaph. Charles passed away in his sleep at 9.45pm on the Saturday evening at his Santa Rosa home, aged 77. He had a last skate around his ice rink earlier in the day. The strip contained a signed farewell, an expanded version of the note he had written previously for the daily strip farewell. ‘Peanuts’ had been the “fulfilment of my childhood ambition,” Charles wrote. He had predicted that the strip would outlive him because strips were produced weeks ahead of publication. His wife, Jeannie said, “He had done everything he wanted.” He drew 17,897 published ‘Peanuts’ strips and was printed daily in 2,600 papers, reaching an estimated 355 million readers in 75 countries, translated into 21 languages. At the time of his death there were 20,000 different new products and merch each year adorned by ‘Peanuts’ characters. His numerous accolades included twice winning the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year,( 1955 and 1964) the professions highest honour and being named International Cartoonist of the Year in 1978, an award voted by 700 comic artists worldwide. He also collected the National Cartoonists Society’s Humour Comic Strip Award in 1962 and their Elzie Segar Award in 1980. He was the recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal, the oldest and highest civilian honour in the US and the French governments Commander of Arts and Letters, not to mention a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, adjacent to Walt Disney no less. When asked the definition of a cartoonist, Charles replied, “A cartoonist is someone who has to draw the same thing every day without repeating himself.”

At the request of his family, no one else was permitted to draw the strip after his death. His contract stipulated when he stopped drawing, the strip would stop. His children were the ones who insisted on that clause, because they “didn’t want anybody else drawing Dad’s strip.” United Feature Syndicate began offering newspapers

THE FINAL STRIP

packages of reprinted strips from the 1960s or 1990s, under the banner ‘Classic Peanuts’. All Sunday strips came from the 1960s.

“He was a master of timing in every way,” said Hank Ketchum, creator of ‘Dennis the Menace.

He named his deadline for quitting his column... made the deadline...and then left. His was an amazing life and career, and he will be sorely missed.” Bill Watterson said that ‘Peanuts’ pretty much “defines the modern comic strip, the clean, minimalist drawings, the sarcastic humour, the unflinching emotional honesty, the inner thoughts of a household pet, the serious treatment of children, the wild fantasies…”

The characters he created and developed over the course of five decades still endure, in the form of reruns, TV specials, films and a museum dedicated to Charles’ work. More than 100 cartoonists paid homage to Charles on May 27, 2000, across countless American newspapers.

Throughout this year ‘Peanuts Worldwide’ has been celebrating the 75th Anniversary of Charles’ beloved creation.

The ‘Peanuts’ website states, “From humble beginnings in just seven U.S. newspapers, ‘Peanuts’has grown to become not only the best-loved comic strip in history, but a true global phenomenon. Today ‘Peanuts’ is featured in online syndication and in thousands of newspapers worldwide; in classic specials and in new streaming series on Apple TV+; and in mobile apps, stage productions, feature films and books (hundreds of them). ‘Peanuts’ has inspired theme park attractions, public art projects and every kind of consumer product from pj’s to popcorn makers. Snoopy has even gone into space (more than once!) thanks to a Space Act Agreement between Peanuts Worldwide and NASA. ‘Peanuts’ speaks a universal language and has also introduced a vocabulary all of its own: “Good Grief!,” “security blanket,” “You blockhead!” and “Happiness is…”

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TECHNOLOGY?

WELCOME TO A.I CORNER

POLITICS AND GAGS. WHAT WILL THE BOTS ACTUALLY COME UP WITH WHEN ASKED TO TOON?

TNC got online and asked CHATGPT to draw a few cartoons. These are the results...

“NICE HORSE”

“SPOT ON”

“KEIR GETIING HIS PAINT MIXED UP”

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“A YOUNG RACHEL WRITING HER BUDGET UPSIDE DOWN”

Do you have any AI atrocities?

Get in touch and we will put them in a future issue of TNC!

THE AI CORNER

“COMPUTER SAYS NO!”

” “WOT NO CATHERINE CRANSTON?

“OUCH! THOUGH I THINK HE MIGHT BE HAPPY WITH THAT”

“GO BANG THAT FART CUSHION NIGE

L!”

“...AND NOT TROUBLING BEN JENN

INGS IN THE GUARDIAN YET EITHER!”

“NOT QUITE WHAT I HAD IN MIND”

“RACIAL PROFILING!”

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LAW & ORDER TOONS

“I swear I’ll sell vermouth, the whole vermouth, and nothing but vermouth!”

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LAW & ORDER TOONS

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LAW & ORDER

‘LOL’ THE CARTOON LAW? DECIPHERNG THE FUN FROM THE COMPLEX ISSUES AND FINDING THE TRUE MEANING RUPERT BESLEY a seasoned voice Are there rules to Cartooning? Unlikely and, if there were, then cartoonists, ever subversive, would always want to break them.

Is there a 1st Law of Cartoons stating that cartoons have to be funny? I think not.

Not everything does what it says on the tin.

Take toothpaste: Advance Whitening, Up to 100% Stain Removal, Starts Whitening after One Brush. Then check in the mirror. And what about window cleaner? Smear-free, it says. But smear it does and always on the other side of the glass. That’s your free smear.

Cartoons aren’t always funny. They don’t always raise a smile. For a gag to work, the viewer must be on the same page as the cartoonist, understanding the context and references on which the joke is based. We all know (or is it just me?) that sinking feeling you get when you show somebody a cartoon you’re pleased with and then get lengthening seconds of staring that eventually end with a face raised in bafflement and concern. ‘Er, could you just expl-‘ No, you couldn’t, you snap back. It either an art-form found across the board, from works first time or not at all and no amount of children’s books to graphic novels, adverts explanation is going to improve that. and packaging to the enhancement of But then, not all cartoons are meant to communications of every kind.n creations be funny. There are plenty of times when humour is not required - sad occasions or PIGEON-HOLING complex issues that a clever cartoon can distil There is a natural tendency in humans to put into a simple image, memorable and easy to things into boxes and then to place these understand. Such cartoons are done with wit in order of preference or importance. In in its primary sense, as defined by Google’s cartooning, accordingly, a gag that makes Oxford English dictionary (‘the capacity it into Private Eye tends to for inventive thought and get rated higher than mere quick understanding; keen cartoon illustration. That’s intelligence’), even if they are ’Cartoon’ means understandable, as such a gag not cause for guffaw.

One of the most memorable different things needs that extra component which is so hard to find, an original idea, cartoons of the last century to different sharp and topical, that will touch was Low’s ‘Very well, alone.’ the funny-bone of the nation.

It appeared in the Evening people.

But maybe such comparisons Standard on 18 June 1940, just are odious and creating days after Dunkirk and days hierarchies is not helpful or fair. before the Fall of France. A Ronald Searle is commonly agreed to have Churchillian British soldier stands on a rock in been the greatest cartoonist of the last 100 storm-lashed seas, fist out in defiance of the darkest of forces ranged against him. No laughs years and he did come up with single gags, particularly in the earlier stages of his career. there, but it caught the mood to perfection.

His range was huge. But, arguably, the bulk of And there is a whole field of cartooning his work and the best of it - from Molesworth cartoon illustration, call it what you will - that to magazine covers, travelogue books to film does not deal in gags, visual or verbal. It’s

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titles, caricature to cats - was cartooning that did not count on jokes. It went far beyond the usual meaning of ‘cartoon’. It was graphic art, ever satirical, at the highest level. Rarely a gag, but always outrageously witty.

‘Cartoon’ means different things to different people. Often those inquiring for the first time after the price of a cartoon haven’t really thought through - or maybe don’t have the right words for - what it is they are after (a ‘characature’ maybe). An original joke, such as may be the cartoonist’s usual line of work, needs more input than a cartoony doodle, which might be quicker, cheaper and easier to supply (but won’t make further money).

There’s plenty of call for such work. It may not be LOL or instantly hilarious, but a cartoon drawing does give a picture of the world that is pleasurable to view. Like the toothpaste, it may not bring a dazzling smile, but it does leave you feeling that bit better inside. I like cartoons to leave me smiling, even if that is just a smile of appreciation for the skill of the artist in tackling the grimmest of subjects..’

RUPERT BESLEY

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THE LAW & ORDER GALLERY

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THEME FOR THE NEXT ISSUE:

TIME

Email entries to editor@thenewcartoonist.co.uk Deadline: AUG 27th 2025 thenewcartoonist.co.uk

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LAW & ORDER TOONS

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EXHIBITION DOWN! for the last time in the Duke TWO HAPPY HOUR DUKES

SAD TIMES! Mark Winter, Pete Songi & Glenn Marshall share a last one for the road...

FINAL DAY FROLICS IN THE GARDEN

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FRIDAY NIGHT CLUB! Lesley Hodsdon, Pete Songi, Steve Hamson & Mark Winter

ANOTHER PUB CL SES

THE FINAL PICTURE SHOW AFTER A BRAVE TWO YEAR FIGHT THE DUKE OF GREENWICH IS SET TO PULL ITS LAST PINT

Nothing lasts forever. Even the Goo Goo Dolls will give up at some point, and sadly it’s my duty to report that the great Duke of Greenwich has run out of gas as well.

My local, ‘The Cartoon Office’, was a place were I headed to most Fridays to meet up with fellow cartoonist Mark ‘Chicane’ Winter. It will close for good on Sunday September 21st.

Those meet ups will hopefully continue at a venue TBA in the future, but for now the sense of loss is palpable. The Duke was more than just a little local tucked away down a side street in East Greenwich, it became a hub; somewhere to meet other cartoonists, and of course the home of four brilliant Cartoon Exhibitions which many of you I know have contributed to.

A victim of increasing rents and low footfall during the week, the pub had this to say...

“After two years of trading we unfortunately could not agree terms with the landlord, meaning the weekend of the 20/21st September will be our last. Thank you to all of the staff, thank you to all every single person that got a drink here.”

Anyone who’s enjoyed the hospitality of Nick, Dan and Jack will be pleased to learn that they also run a sister pub in Vauxhall called The Jolly Gardeners , which happily remains open for now.

So the final bell rings...

“Don’t you have any homes to go to?”

Well, I guess we have now!

PUBS & BARS NEAR ME...

Winter 2023

TIME GENTLEMEN PLEASE! The Duke closed its doors forever on September 21st

SUMMER LOVIN’ Summer 2024

DESERT ISLAND Summer 2025

EXTENDED UNTIL FEB 29

th

LET IT SNOW! Winter 2024

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EXHIBITION

CELEBRATING THE ART...

THE POWER OF DRAWING: MARKING 25 YEARS OF THE ROYAL DRAWING SCHOOL. MARK WINTER out and about To commemorate it’s first quarter of a century, the Royal Drawing School staged ‘The Power of Drawing’, marking the 25th Anniversary of the famed institute during July this year at its studios in Shoreditch, London.

The free exhibition showcased drawings and quotes from a selection of the School’s alumni together with 25 invited acclaimed creatives, across a range of disciplines, from painting and sculpture to music, poetry, film, architecture and illustration to highlight the essential role that drawing plays in all artistic fields and to celebrate the power of drawing to fuel creative practice.

Founded in 2000 by His Majesty, King Charles lll (then the Prince of Wales) and London-based abstract painter, Catherine Goodman as The Prince’s Drawing School, before changing to its current name in 2014, the Royal Drawing School is an artist-led, not-for-profit educational organisation and registered charity. It is part of The Prince’s Charities, supported by King Charles III Charitable Fund, which also includes The Prince’s Teaching Institute, Children & the Arts and The King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts. It has two London campuses, tone at he converted Shoreditch warehouse and the other at Trinity Buoy Wharf in Poplar. The school also collaborates with The national Gallery, The British Museum, Royal Academy of Arts, National Portrait Gallery and the V&A among others. The School views drawing as more than an artistic medium.

It believes “drawing improves mental health, helps students understand how to nurture a skill, enables critical examination of an object or a subject and feeds an appreciation of the built and

HIGHGROVE FROM THE THYME WALK..

The Kings work

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THE POWER OF DRAWING Royal Drawing School 19-22 Charlotte Road, London, EC2A 3SG

natural environment. It began with a prince, an artist, a handful of students in an attic room and a deep-rooted belief in the necessity of drawing.

Twenty-five years on, and the Royal Drawing School (RDS) is a thriving institution offering more than 350 courses, ranging from drop-in sessions and short modules to the highly regarded postgraduate drawing year.”

ROYAL APPROVAL

Featuring among the fifty exhibitors was the reigning monarch himself, with his notational sketch ‘Highgrove from the Thyme Walk’, dated 2000.

“Drawing is one of the most direct ways of engaging with the world and provides a foundational route to human creativity”, the King said. “The School remains one of the few institutions worldwide dedicated to high quality, observational drawing.

I am immensely proud of its significant contribution to making drawing accessible to all.”

David Hockney’s 2008 charcoal studies, ‘Cut Trees-Timber’ and ‘Timber Gone’ are also included alongside Dame Tracey Emin’s ‘Because You Left-I Held On’, an acrylic work on lithographic background

and Catherine Goodman’s charcoal and pastel piece, ‘Primordial Landscape, 2024. Other participants included Apple’s chief designer, Sir Jony Ive, with two sketches he produced in 1981 when he was aged 14, Tony and Olivier Award-winning stage designer Es Devlin, painter Chantal Joffe, singer, songwriter and composer Rufus Wainwright, sculptor Sir Antony Gormley and, according to his Insta bio, “artist, broadcaster, transvestite, telly addict, worshipper of teddy bears, loves being on two wheels”, Sir Grayson Perry.

The exhibition’s cartoon connection is evident in the distinctive and instantly recognisable illustration style of Sir Quentin Blake, whose ‘Man and Stork in Conversation’ pen, ink and watercolour image from the last year’s ‘Uplifted’ Series. “Drawing is especially important to me as it seems to be the mode of expression which comes most naturally,” Sir Quentin stated in his quote. “Fifty years ago I would have been using a pencil, but now for a great deal of the time I draw with a ball point pen. The idea that this is not an implement of art has its own appeal, but it is possible to use a ball point pen in a detailed and contemplative way when the occasion demands it,” he concluded. Alongside hangs an untitled ink and watercolour by visionary film

director, Tim Burton, which comically depicts a couple of Royal Guardsmen and their iconic tall black bearskin hats. After he graduated from CalArts, where he studied character animation, Tim worked for the Disney Company from 1981-84 as an animator, storyboard artist and graphic designer on a number of features and a couple of shorts-one being ‘Frankenweenie’, which famously got him fired. The Mouse House deemed it too scary for children! However that didn’t stop him becoming one of cinema’s most imaginative and visual filmmakers, coining the adjective ‘Burtonesque’ and reinvigorating the art of stop-motion animation.“Drawings are like an abstract diary for me...a time, a place, a feeling. Nothing literal, but a memory,” Tim stated. On the same wall is an ink piece, ‘A Bad Drawing for the Royal Drawing School’ by Charlie Mackesy, who started his career as a cartoonist for ‘The Spectator’, before becoming a book illustrator for Oxford University Press. His phenomenally successful book, ‘The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse’ was first published in October 2019, becoming the longest ‘Sunday Times’ Hardback Number One of all time and receiving multiple awards. He co-directed (with Peter Baynton) and co-wrote (with Jon Croker) the animated short film based on the book.

Charlie and producer Matthew Freud won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film at the 2023 Academy Awards. “One of the best things for me about drawing is how it feels during the making of it-which is often better than the experience of finishing it. I would say that the healing nature of mark making probably saved my life,” said Charlie.

HOCKNEY’S TREES..

On the walls

ALUMNI

To highlight the breadth of talent nurtured by the School, half the contributors in the exhibition were RDS alumni, including Douglas Farthing, a former Parachute Regiment soldier, who retired and “got into drawing through the School.” He spent 16 months in the Ukraine, working with humanitarian teams. His pencil renderings, drawn on the ground in and around Odesa include portraits of civilians and scenes from the trenches. Two pages from his sketchbook were on display. Another alumni was musician, composer and artist, Daniel Blumberg, who wrote the score for the 2024 film ‘The Brutalist’, winning a BAFTA Award for Best Original Music and the Academy Award for Best Original Score. He was awarded a scholarship in 2015 to study for a postgraduate diploma at RDS, specializing in silverpoint, the ancient drawing technique, popular during the Renaissance with Raphael, Da Vinci and Durer amongst the more well known practitioners.

It involves using a fine silver wire or stylus, depositing tiny particles of silver onto a prepared ground, creating delicate silvery-grey lines that

thenewcartoonist.co.uk

DANIEL BLUMBERG Silverpoint sketch

DOUGLAS FARTHING Ukraine sketches

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EXHIBITION

CORNELIA PARKER Bullet Drawing

gain character over time as the metal oxidizes.

Daniel’s simple sketch of a standing trumpeter was included in the exhibition.

For an opportunity to also display their work, free drawing materials were available to visitors throughout the exhibition’s run, with former students on hand to offer advice.

For the artists featured, drawing holds a multiplicity of meanings: it is ‘like breathingmagic (Eileen Hogan), ‘the breathe of art’ (Antony Gormley), a ‘cure’ (Rufus Wainwright), a ‘universal language’ (Ishbel Myerscough), ‘ Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clear, and clearer still,(David Hockney), or a ‘dialogue’ between a sheet of paper and the self (Tracey Emin). It can be a way of thinking, reflective or funny, critical or confrontational.

The entrance sign included the statement: “Today, the boundaries of what drawing can be, how it is created and where it can take us are expanding. Drawings with pencil, pastel or charcoal are represented here in all their scope and possibility, but these are not the only tools at an artist’s disposal. We witness the flexibility and diversity of mark-making with a range of materials, from the humble pencil to an iPad, to Cornelia Parker’s wire drawing made from melted down bullets. In our image-saturated culture, and, with the growing possibilities of technology, the debates around image-making are as live as ever. It is often said that we are living through a crisis of attention, with our senses bombarded by a flood of information and images. The practice of drawing encourages us to pause, notice and look again. It is an invitation and a challenge to slow down and to look more closely, to explore our inner and outer worlds.”

Further anniversary events, including a series of streamed talks are scheduled. Consult the school’s website for further details.

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CATHERINE-GOODMAN Primordial Landscape

CHARLIE MACKESY Sketch

PUBLIC ATTEMPTS

TIM BURTON Sketch

ROYAL DRAWING SCHOOL

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MY NEW BOSS!

A VERY VERY NEW CARTOONIST...

TNC CATCHES UP WITH THE NEW AND UPCOMING TALENT CHOOSING TO POKE FUN WITH A PENCIL, PAINT, FELT TIPS OR iPAD

DYANA SONGI meets Wynnie Kinsella Wynnie is 7 years old and lives in Islington, North London. She loves drawing and cartooning, and is particularly good at portraying animals..

Wynnie has a very strong sense of colour and enjoys creating her own characters as well as drawing from life. Her illustrations are often centred on the notion of manifestation; she envisions how she sees her future and draws that onto paper - mainly using felt tips - and preferably the posh ones! In this imagined future, she has lots of pets and leads quite a glamorous lifestyle! With each drawing of this type, she feels is sending a message to the

universe and that that brings her vision closer to her.

Wynnie has been very inspired by watching the adult cartoonists demonstrating how they draw in previous TNC interviews, and has had a go at this herself.

You might be my new boss one day Wynnie.

What sort of boss would you be?

‘If I was your boss I’d be a fair boss. We would have pizza for lunch every day, and you would be allowed to jump on the sofas if you need a movement break. However, if you ignored me I would make you eat onion and garlic sandwiches!’

WATCH WYNNIE DRAW!

SUNSET THE UNICORN

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DOLLY THE DOG

WYNNIE KINSELLA

NIGHT ON THE TOWN

CAT IN HIGH HEELS

AMBITIONS!

Would you like to have your work featured in My New Boss?

Please email editor@thenewcartoonist.co.uk with your full name, date of birth, and a parent/guardian’s name, mobile number and email address. You must be aged 12 or under, and be resident in the UK or available overseas.

You must also be prepared to take part in a Zoom interview and submit your own work only. thenewcartoonist.co.uk

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PENS DOWN!

IT’S PERLMAN AGAIN...

ANOTHER COMPILATION OF CARTOONS FROM THE CELEBRATED NEW YORKER CARTOONIST The talented New Yorker cartoonist Asher Perlman has a new book out - and it’s a belter!

Themes include anxiety, OCD, the human condition, death, God and pretty much everything else besides; Nothing is off limits.

It’s a total gag-fest which will make you cringe one minute and laugh out the next. A true craftsman at work that knows how to get the best out of any situation.

It’s the expressions that’ll grab you!! Hit the link opposite and grab a copy today. You won’t be disappointed!

BUY HERE

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63 Wells Street, London W1A 3AE

5 minutes walk from Oxford Circus underground station

Event: 4 October 2025 21st March 2026 The Future Was Then The Future Was Then features over 80 pages of original comic art alongside other items that tell stories about the future of the human race from 1990 to 4000 AD. The exhibition includes original work from iconic futuristic worlds such as Tank Girl, Judge Dredd, Black Mirror, Buck Rogers and Thunderbirds, and original artwork by legendary artists such as Jamie Hewlett, Frank Bellamy and Sydney Jordan. Science fiction and dystopian comics give us possible visions of Earth’s future, imagining what may be in store for humanity. Will hope triumph, with space rangers taking to the cosmos to explore new worlds? Or will fear set in, with futuristic authoritarian regimes taking hold?

MORE INFO HERE

CREDITS

Buck Rogers © Rebellion Developments Ltd Connie Brick Bradford Judge Dredd © Rebellion Developments Ltd

Rogue Trooper © Rebellion Developments Ltd Bad Company II © Rebellion Developments Ltd Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future © Rebellion Developments Ltd Phoo Action © Jamie Hewlett

Event ends: 28 September 2025 Cats In Cartoons From Garfield to Simon’s Cat, Krazy Kat to Bagpuss and everything in between, there is a long line of iconic cartoon cats.

For the first time, The Cartoon Museum is collecting many of the greatest cats to grace or comics, newspapers and magazines to explore why people love cats so much and what cats tell us about life.

Featuring works by artists such as Louis Wain, Ronald Searle, Heath Robinson, Wendy Eastwood, Simon Tofield, Anthony Smith, Gemma Correll, Natty Peterkin and Hunt Emerson - and more!

BOOK NOW

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EVENTS & ADS

BEGINS - THU, 24 JUL 2025 - 10:30 ENDS - SAT, 29 NOV 2025 - 17:30

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

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ANIMATION

DISNEY’S NINE OLD MEN

PAINTING MOVING PICTURES...

MARK WINTER Animated One hundred years ago, twenty-three year-old Walt Disney purchased a singlestory, 1,600 -square-foot space for $1,000, in two instalments at 2719 Hyperion Ave in Edendale, a few miles west of downtown Los Angeles...the first official Walt Disney Studio.

In 1935, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt coined the term “Nine Old Men”, a dismissive description of the nine justices of the Supreme Court, all aged over 70, who he felt had lost touch with the ever-changing times. Walt Disney jokingly ‘borrowed’ the colloquial term several years later to affectionately refer to his core team of animators- Les Clark, John Lounsbery, Marc Davis, Ward Kimball, Milt Kahl, Wolfgang Reitherman, Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, even though they were neither old nor out of touch. According to Frank, they formed a board in the mid 1940s to solve the possible problems affecting its animation productions. When Walt learned that there were nine members, he called them his ‘Nine Old Men,’ most of whom were in their 30s and 40s. With Walt concentrating on other ventures such as television and theme parks, the nine animators were seen as the power at the studio during the 1950s and 60s and still remain some of the most influential and respected animators of all time.

EARLY YEARS

The ‘Nine’ were individually men of varying talents and vastly different personalities. They

THE ORGINAL HYPERION-STUDIO

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NINE ANIMATING STARS Back row: Milt Kahl, Marc Davis, Frank Thomas, Eric Larson & Ollie Johnston Front row: Woolie Reitherman, Les Clark, Ward Kimball & John Lounsbery

were all hired by Disney (referred to as ‘The Old Maestro’) in the late 1920s and 1930s. After initially working on the animated shorts, they all ‘cut their teeth’ as animators or assistant animators on the very first animated feature film, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,’ released in 1937. Despite derision from most of the film industry, who dubbed the production ‘Disney’s Folly,’ Walt assembled the Studio staff in a sound stage on October 30, 1934, and, acted out the entire ‘Snow White’ story for three hours before announcing that they were pressing ahead with the project.

Ward Kimball said that all the staff were enthusiastic, but they were told by just about everyone, including Hollywood moguls, such as W.C. Fields that “It was OK, six-seven minutes, like the shorts, but an hour and a half, no way!… you

run out of funny things to do...and bright colours would hurt their eyes!” Woolie Reitherman recalled, “There was a great feeling of excitement in those days. We were actually poking into the unknown.” Walt mortgaged his home, exceeded the original budget of $150,000, tenfold, which blew out to $1.5 million ($1,488,422.74 to be precise), a massive amount for 1937. ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles on December 1, 1937, receiving a standing ovation, critical acclaim, an Honorary Academy Award and earning more than $8 million during its initial release, and with inflation adjusted, it is still the highest-grossing animated film. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, certainly the best American animated feature of all time. The film ushered in Disney’s ‘Golden Age,’ a brief period that marked the creation of groundbreaking animated feature films, a significant departure from the short cartoons that were the industry standard. Revolutionary techniques such as the multiplane camera that added depth and a three-dimensional effect to a scene, special effects, rotoscoping and the elevation of animation to a recognized art form, using life-like character movements based on realistic human figure drawings. Four landmark films followed, ‘Pinocchio (1940), ‘Fantasia’ (1940), ‘Dumbo (1941) and ‘Bambi’ (1942). The period ended after that, followed by a decade of uncertainty, influenced by financial pressures with the loss of the European market, a costly animator’s strike and the changing landscape of World War II with the ‘Wartime Era’ budget cuts. They shifted away from the lavish full-length animated features to ‘package’

films such as ‘Saludos Amigos’ (1942) and ‘The Three Caballeros’ (1942), comprised of multiple short films within each. The Disney Studios also produced wartime propaganda, including antiNazi commercials encouraging citizens to buy war bonds. The beginning of the 1950s saw a return to the original formula, known as the ‘Silver Age’, a ‘restoration era’ that produced beautiful animation, a more European style with ornate backgrounds using softer colours. It included eight features, beginning with ‘Cinderella’ (1950), which grossed over $182m worldwide and saved the studio from financial collapse.

A “miracle” indeed.

They dedicated their win to “fellow Iranians who are still suffering.”

The xerox process, a method of photocopying drawings directly on to the animation cels to speed up production that did leave the animation with dark, sketch-like outlines was first introduced on ‘One Hundred and One Dalmations’ (1961). The final film of the era, which also included ‘Peter Pan’,(1953), and ‘Lady and the Tramp’ (1955) was the massively successful ‘The Jungle Book,’(1967), earning $378m at the box-office. It was the last production that Walt had direct influence, released shortly after he passed away from lung cancer on 12 December, 1966, a significant turning point for the Company. A transitional period followed with Walt Disney Productions becoming more diversified. It expanded into live-action films and television. Animated films were not the sole focus, with lower production budgets and more recycled animation.

The ‘Nine Old Men’ began to retire in the 1970’s with Eric Larson the last to leave after his consulting role ended on ‘The Great Mouse Detective’ in 1986.

a swift, delft line,” Walt said, “why don’t you come to work on Monday?” It was a temporary position, that lasted almost half a century. Chief animator Ub Iwerks and Walt created Mickey Mouse as a replacement for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, who was stolen by Charles Mintz at Winkler Studios. Les worked as an inbetweener on the early films, starting with the first synchronized sound cartoon short and major hit, ‘Steamboat Willie’ in 1928.

When Ub, left to start his own company, Les became the official animator of the character, the only one of the ‘Old Men’ to work on the origins of iconic rodent and was dubbed the ‘Mickey Mouse Master.’ Les was known for his staging and personality animation, which was rhythmic with a subtle, sincere, clear expression of emotion. He concentrated on the small things that revealed the character’s inner world, found in glances, pauses and breathing. “These quiet beats give life and authenticity to an animated performance,” he said. Les THE FIRST SNOW WHITE POSTER worked on the complicated ‘Silly Song’ scene in ‘Snow White’, including Dopey smashing his face with a cymbal. He animated the short ‘Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day’ the title character in ‘Pinocchio’ and Mickey in (1968), winning the Oscar for Best Animated the ‘Sorcerers’s Apprentice’ segment in ‘Fantasia.’ Short and collecting the coverted statue on Les made his directorial debut on ‘Paul Bunyan’ behalf of Walt, who was awarded it posthumously.

(1958) and was a sequence director on ‘Sleeping Following Walt’s death in 1966, Woolie assumed Beauty,’ (1959). the creative leadership after studio execs By the time he retired in 1975, Les was the discussed closeing the animation department. longest continuously employed member of Walt “This was survival as far as I was concerned...

Disney Productions. to keep this thing called Disney animation,” he

Leslie James Clark Born: November 1, 1907.

Died: September 12, 1979

Joined Walt Disney Productions (WDP) in June, 1933. Retired in 1981. (He left the company in 1942 to enlist in the US Army Air Force during World War II, returning in 1947).

Munich-born Woolie started as an animator on several ‘Silly Symphonies’ shorts. He excelled in dramatic action-packed animation such as Monstro the whale in ‘Pinocchio’ and the dinosaur battle in Igor Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ segment in ‘Fantasia.’ Enlisting in the US Army Air Force, during World War II, Woolie flew combat missions in Africa, China, India and the South Pacific, receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross and the rank of Major.

He returned to Disney in 1947 and became the first animator to be given the sole directorial reins on a feature, ‘The Sword in the Stone’ (1963).

He also helmed

Joined the Walt Disney Studio in February, 1927.

Retired in September, 1975.

While still at high school, Les had a summer job at the lunch counter of an ice cream parlor, located near the Walt Disney Studio. Walt and his brother and business partner Roy were frequent customers. One day he complimented Les on the lettering he did on the menus, so Les asked him for a job and at Walt’s request, sent in some drawings after graduating in 1927. “You have

DISNEY FLIP BOOKS

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Wolfgang ‘Woolie’ Reitherman.

Born: June 26, 1909 Died: May 22, 1985

said. He continued to direct and produce all the animation projects, including ‘The Jungle Book,’ ‘The Aristocats’ (1970), and ‘Robin Hood’ until his retirement in 1980. Sadly Woolie died in a car accident in 1985.

Eric Cleon Larson.

Born: September 3, 1905.

Died: October 25, 1988

Joined WDP in June, 1933. Retired: February, 1986. Regarded by all as one of Disney’s top animators-’the animators animator’, Eric started at Disney in 1933. After five weeks of, what he described as ‘boring’ inbetweening, he assisted Ham Luske, animating the forest animals in ‘Snow White’ before supervising the animation of Figaro the cat in ‘Pinocchio’, the Pegasus family in ‘Fantasia’ and the old friend Owl in ‘Bambi.’

Eric was also responsible for animating most of the title character in ‘Cinderella’ and Peter Pan’s flight over London. He was renowned for his realism, emphasizing body language and weight to convey character personality and emotion, making them “feel real” Eric was a gentle and devoted mentor to the next generation. He was in charge of recruiting and the training programme with an ability to spot ,and teach emerging talent such as Brad Bird, Don Bluth, Tim Burton, John Lasseter, Ron Clements, Andreas Deja and Glen Keane, who said, “when you came into see Larson it was the end of the world. When you left,

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ANIMATION Franklin Rosborough Thomas.

Born: September5, 1912.

Died: September 8, 2004

THE SCREENING ROOM

the sun was shining, the clouds had parted and everything was possible.” Eric retired in 1986, after completing work on ‘The Great Mouse Detective.’

Ward Walrath Kimball Born: March 4, 1914. Died: July 8, 2002,

campuses and jazz festivals until the 1970s and releasing 13 LPs. His final role at Disney was animation director for ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’ (1971).

Milton Erwin Kahl.

Born: March 22, 1909. Died: April 19, 1987 Joined WDP in June, 1934. Retired: April, 1976.

Joined WDP in April, 1934. Retired in August, 1973. ( Returned on occasions as a consultant on ( Returned briefly in 1985 during the production phase of ‘The Black Cauldron’ to do character certain projects). designs).

Often seen as the oddball of Disney animation One of the most influential and possibily the with his irreverent style of humour but was one most infamous of the ‘Old Men,’ he was known as of Walt’s favourite animators-perhaps the most ‘The Michelanglo of Animation,’ with exceptional ‘un-lDisney-like’ of the ‘Old Men.’ Walt called and dynamic drafting skills. His angular him a genius, who was constantly style was inspired by Ronald Searle and looking to do things differently, in a Picasso. He was a master of figure unique, innovative and diverse drawing with expressive, believable manner. He instilled life into human and animal anatomy every character, a whimsical, and dynamic movement more rebellious prankster who responsible than anyone for the pushed boundaries. “In the classic Disney character designs. canon of Disney animation, “His hard edged personality didn’t Ward stands as the antithesisstop him from creating most jolly and the alternative to the traditional lovable Disney characters,” said Disney Disney style. His characters exploded WARD KIMBALL & OSCAR veteran, Floyd Norman. “King Kahl could onto the screen in an often illogical, simply do things nobody else could do.” zany, bold fashion that was always With a tremendous amount of ego, Milt utterly original,” wrote Lucaso considered himself the best and said as much.

Seastrom in the Disney Family Museum’s bio.

Andreas Deja, his protege in the 1970s, said he His expressive love of slapstick can be seen in was “tough, but in a gentle way.” Jim Hill “ Not just the crows in ‘Dumbo’ (1941) and the Mad Hatter and Cheshire Cat in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ (1951), a prescence in D-wing, he was a force with heavy footsteps!”

Lucifer the cat and the mice mates, Gus and Jac Notable work included Shere Khan, Kaa, Mowgli, in ‘Cinderella’ and of course Jimney Cricket in Bagheera and King Louie in ‘The Jungle Book,’ ‘Pinocchio.’ Ward directed the Oscar -winning shorts, ‘Toot, Whistle, Pluck and Boom,’(1953) and the title characters in ‘Pinocchio,’‘Bambi,’ ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ ‘Peter Pan,’and ‘Robin Hood.’

‘It’s Tough to be a Bird,’ (1969).

His trademark quirk like a signature was the ‘Milt He was also a talented jazz trombonist, Kahl Swaggle’ – a head wiggle from side to side founding and leading the seven-piece Dixieland defined many Disney characters and the selfband, ‘Firehouse Five Plus Two’ with Frank assured Kahl himself.

Thomas playing piano, that toured clubs, college

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Joined WDP in September, 1934. Retired: January, 1978.

Legendary animator Chuck Jones christened Frank the ‘Laurence Olivier of animators.”

He started at Disney in 1934, employee No. 224 and one of 8 animators working on the dwarfs in ‘Snow White’ under leads Fred Moore and Bill Tytia. Known for the specifisc emotions he gave each dwarf ,the source of his inspiration was the character’s personality and its entertainment value such as the dancing penguins in ‘Mary Poppins’ (1964). He was considered the best ’actor’ of the ‘Old Men’ with his analytical thinking, and understanding of presenting an array of emotions and attention to detail.

Frank was responsible for the spaghetti scene in ‘Lady and the Tramp,’ one of the most iconic moments in cinema history. Walt was originally against it. He thought it looked silly, not romantic, but Frank animated the whole scene to convince him, which he did. After the first screening, “I hear you’ve got the best scene in the picture,” Walt remarked dryly. Walt characteristically never gave praise, so Frank knew that may be the best he would ever get.

After retiring he co-authored, with best friend, Ollie Johnston ‘Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life,’(1981) considered to be ‘the bible’ of traditional hand-drawn animation.

Oliver Martin Johnston Jr. Born: October 31, 1912.

Died: April 14, 2008,

Joined WDP on January, 1935. Retired: January, 1978.

Ollie’s first assignment after starting at Disney was a cleanup artist on ‘Mickey’s Garden’ (1935) before, like Frank, assisting Fred Moore animating the dwarfs in ‘Snow White.’ Fred died in a car accident in 1952. Ollie kept his pencil taped to his window as a memento. He became a full animator on ‘Pinocchio’, where he did the scene of the puppet coming to life. His work was so good, Walt raised his salary three times before the film was finished. He became a supervising animator on ‘Fantasia’ and ‘Bambi.’ Like Frank he relied on pure emotions, an intuitive way of animating focusing on the nuanced character acting and showing softer, subtle, elusive touches. “No two characters would perform a similar action in the same way, and even the same character would have different approaches to the same action depending on their emotional state,” he explained. His final work was Rufus the cat in ‘The Rescuers’. Ollie and Frank retired from production on the same Friday. Oscar-winning director, Brad Bird recalls,”I was the next animator on Ollie’s desk. I was properly awed as I sat in his chair, at his desk. I noticed that his pencil sharpener was full of shavings...I put them in a

glass jar, labelled it and sat it atop the desk.

Good luck shavings...a simple reminder of the hard work required to create magic. My own jar of real Disney dust.”

John Mitchell Lounsbery.

Born: March 9, 1911 Died: February 13, 1976

Joined WDP in July, 1935. Died while directing ‘The Rescurers.’ in 1976.

Affectionally known as ‘Louns’, one of the busiest and most prolific animators, known for his strong draughtsmanship, s distinctive ‘squashy, stretchy’ feel. He assisted Norm Ferguson on the old hag character in ‘Snow White,’ but was uncredited. He then animated the fox, J. Worthington Foulfellow and the cat, Gideon in ‘Pinocchio,’ some of the dogs in ‘Lady and the Tramp’ and the elephants and Shere Khan the tiger in ‘The Jungle Book.’ His favourite character was Ben Ali, the dancing alligator in ‘Fantasia.’ In the 1970s he was promoted, directing the Oscar-nominated ‘Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too’ (1974) and ‘The Rescurers’(1977), but died of a heart attack before completion, after 41 years with the Company.

Marc Fraser Davis.

Born: March 30, 1913.

Died: January 12, 2000,

Joined WDP in December, 1935. Retired: 1978. (Returned as a consultant on EPCOT at Walt Disney World in Florida and Tokyo Disneyland and Imagineering projects until 1978).

Marc applied to Disney after watching the Silly Symphony ‘Who Killed Cock Robin,’ (1935) spending countless hours drawing animals at zoos. “Marc can do story, he can do character, he can animate, he can design shows for me.

All I have to do is tell him what I want and it’s there. He’s my Renaissance Man,” Walt said.

Expert in character personality and design such as Tinker Bell and Cruella de Vil, he was renowned for his work on female characters and called Disney’s “ladies man.” When asked what piece of the studios’s animation he fancied the most, Walt replied “ I guess it would be where Cinderella gets the ballgown.

It was Marc who animated Cinderella during her transformation.” Marc and his costumedesigner wife, Alice had key roles in the creation of a number of Disneyland attractions such as ‘It’s A Small World,’ and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean.’.

All ‘Nine Old Men’ were honoured as ‘Disney Legends’ in 1989, Eric, Woolie, Les, Milt and John posthumously. They each separately received the Winsor McCay Award for their lifetime contribution to the art of animation.

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HALLOWEEN

IT’S ALL VERY GHHOOUULLY...

Boo! It’s that time of the year when we all go a bit batty and attack the archives for spooky cartoon offerings!

Ahh Halloween - originating from the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, celebrated over 2,000 years ago, marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. The Celts believed the veil between the living and spirit worlds was thinnest on Samhain (November 1st), allowing spirits to return. To ward off evil spirits and welcome benevolent ones, Celts built bonfires, wore costumes, and offered food and drink. The traditions were later blended with Christian festivals and brought to North America by immigrants, evolving into the modern-day Halloween.

Trick or treat? Well TNC asked cartoonists for their own interpretations of candy bars or pranks.

These are their stories...

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CAPTION COMPETITION!

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CAPTION COMPETTION

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Email jpg entries by 27th October 2025 to editor@thenewcartoonist.co.uk or hit the link below!

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CONGRATULATIONS! Stephen wins a TNC mug for matching up against Pete Songi from the last issue!

Prophetical Mildred

HOROSCOPES Sagittarius

the most accurate soothsayer in the Greater London region for cartoonist horoscopes

22 November – 21 December

You will discover that your cartoons are being blocked by the Online Safety Act and feel weirdly proud about the level of smut you seem to be producing being officially ‘cockblocked’ by the authorities.

When a couple of tamer cartoons seem to get through the net you will write a strongly worded letter of complaint.

Aries

21 March – 19 April

You will adopt a pet lark and feed it all kinds of colourful berries and bird seed laxatives so that it shits a colourful menagerie of hell and you can release a limited edition series of Jackson Pol-Lark cartoons. .

Capricorn

22 December – 19 January

Taurus

20 April – 20 May

Do you remember there was a fifteen minute period back in the early 2000s where shaving/waxing designs into your pubic hair was a fashionable thing to do? You will attempt to bring that back with all the millennial nostalgia going on right now, but with a cartooning bent. You will end up on multiple watch-lists. .

Virgo

23 August – 22 September

You will receive an anonymous letter with just a cartoon inside. Inspired, you will send a random cartoon to a made up address. You will start a worldwide movement of random cartoons by mail

Gemini

Libra

The guy who lives five doors down from you is a twat. You draw a caricature of him on his front door. As it turns out, he’s also a bit thick so he spends a lot of time trying to drum up publicity for the new Banksy that’s just arrived on his property before he finally admits defeat and sheepishly covers it over

Annoyed at how many cartoons you draw that are being rejected by editors, you will redraw each one on a square of toilet paper and inadvertently make an art piece that prestigious

21 May – 21 June

Cancer

22 June – 22 July

You will boil up a batch of invisible ink, and the cartoons you draw on official forms, very important signage and your local MPs front window are simply obscene.

Leo

23 September – 23 October

galleries around the world fight tooth and nail for

Scorpio

24 October – 21 November

You join an international cartoon club while you are a little bit drunk, and awaken to find you’ve accidentally joined a drug cartel. At least you get staff discounts on drugs.

The embassy of a far away country you’ve not quite heard of contacts you to inform you that a cartoon you drew last year has insulted their King.

However, there is a possibility of a revolutionary coup led by a fellow who really rather likes you.

Aquarius

20 January – 18 February

You will be contacted by the Royal Society of Melancholy Baldies, as they have the mad idea to cheer themselves up by getting cartoons drawn on their bald spots. If this works they will rename themselves the Royal Society of Whimsically High Spirited Baldies. It’s imperative you get this sorted before they next order a batch of business cards.

Pisces

19 February – 20 March

You will start a campaign to demand that different tropical islands around the world sponsor their favourite cartoonists so that they get publicity and cartoonists get a nice holiday in the sun. Only one cartoonist gets sponsored as part of your campaign and it’s that one you can’t stand, the one who only cartoons with Mont Blanc pens, who had a major publishing house buy them a solid gold cartooning throne and has really good hair. You will seethe.

23 July – 22 August

God will contact you directly and give you cartooning ideas. Unfortunately his ideas are shit and unpublishable, but it’s really difficult to tell God to piss off so you’ll be stuck with these shit ideas for a while

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PARTING SHOT

A NEW SUIT, A FRIDAY NIGHT & A MAGICAL TWENTY TRIP OH NOT TO BE TWENTY-SOMETHING AGAIN WITHOUT A GUIDING STAR OR A MOBILE PHONE PETE SONGI Not again!

I’ve often wondered about reality TV game shows, you know the ones, where some fresh faced A-List Celeb is stuck in a jungle faced by critters or tasked with trying to dance their way to stardom and no doubt heartbreak.

How about we fill them full of alcohol, chuck in a few embarrassing situations to mess with their minds and then drop them in the middle of nowhere and say, right, now find your way home, with no phone or tech to guide you. Welcome to the early nineties kids!

IPCMEDIA.COM

I was a very smart ‘MediaType’ back then, all blue shirts and colourful ties with wide shiny suits and slippy brogues to match. The attire never really matched my role in Magazine production & design but hey, I was going to rock it none the less. Spending what tiny salary I earned keeping my wardrobe freshly updated with the latest offering at The Disney store, or long afternoons trying on the latest that River Island in Hounslow High Street had to offer.

That clobber (A £59.99 grey suit) was fresh on as I approached the best day of a working month. Friday after pay-day was when all things good would happen, where the day would wizz by, deadlines would come and go and it would all end with like-minded colleagues hitting the Stamford Arms on Stamford Street in Waterloo, London, until closing.

This particularly Friday was extra special in super bold text, as it came with a leaving do & karaoke up on the second floor, the sort of ‘closed for private event’ event that creates even higher expectations. Add the excitement of a cold, dark February night and the hint of snow to keep you inside for that fateful ‘one for the road’ later, and the night was already feeling eventful.

I was on cider back then, Strongbow for my sins. It made me feel brave and strong, like a newly enhanced Pacman chasing a ghost.

Nothing was off limits; the banter, the pisstaking, or even delivering songs with aplomb in front of a crowd of fellow workers. Want to talk about me on Monday morning? You go for it.

When you’re that young (22), it’s just about

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living your best life. Responsibilities? Having enough to pay the mortgage on that 1 Bed flat?

Food shop?

“Nah, put ‘Delilah’ up again, I wanna give it another go!”

JOURNEYS

It’s that young (see ‘stupid’) carefree attitude that’s the fuel in your twenties, creating the experiences you overcome that you draw on as you get older.

Finding yourself squinting at a departures board for the last train is par for the course, grabbing that baguette for the journey is just the norm and nodding off twenty seconds before hitting your destination in leafy Isleworth 40 mins later, well that’s just bloody typical!

I’ll gloss over the reality that I had gone to the wrong platform at Waterloo and got a Hounslow bound train instead. It’s these small ingredients in a story that turn a ham & cheese into a shit sandwich but I digress.

So as I whizzed through what I thought was going to be Isleworth but turned out to be Hounslow I was in the land of nod. Completely oblivious to the world when it shot through Staines, and barely vacant as we left Egham.

I’m not sure what stirred me, probably the sniggers of fellow passengers but as the train pulled into Virginia Water, the Pacman pellet kicked in and I leapt out of the train like my life depended on it.

CHOICES

These days finding yourself after the last train has left the station staring into the dark abyss of an unknown area would not be an issue. A quick Uber maybe, or at least a google-map check via that super computer in your pocket would quickly solve the problem.

Well kids, it’s still 1994 and I didn’t have that luxury. My only choice was to head left or right, What would you choose?

Those that chose left were wrong; nothing for 10 minutes, trust me I tried it. Heading right would find a few lights and the godsend of a grubby looking cab office with a huge map on the wall covering the tip of West London.

It’s at these times that the spare magical £20 you keep in your inside pocket for such unfortunate events really comes to the fore

and just like Batman’s utility belt, it came to the rescue again.

A mantra in my role in magazine production is to work back from deadline and prepare for any eventuality. So in this case, waking up in Virginia Water was the magazine getting printed, the £20 was me preparing, some might even say I’ve been rescued before....Ahem.

I say rescue, the cab got me as far as Feltham and no further, which is still a good 1hr 45 walking distance to the comfy 1 bed flat (No night buses, trust me I looked).

I made it to the edge of Hounslow Hight street before the snow that had now turned to ice finally took the feet away from me and put paid to suit inthe form of a nice big rip to the knee.

At least I had something more embarrassing to share at work the following Monday to distract everyone from my terrible singing! LOL

GOT A ‘FUNNY’ STORY YOU WANT TO SHARE?

e: editor@thenewcartoonist.co.uk

KEVIN WELLS

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