The Art of True Blood

Or at any rate, the art of Lisa Desimini, for the covers of Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Novels, adapted for TV as True Blood; but that really doesn't trip off the tongue.




Let's begin with the TV series itself before we look at the books, because True Blood begins its British TV debut on FX later this week, and I have an interest in vampire lore. Many more moons ago than I care to admit, I began a thesis on The Role of the Gothic Outsider. I had high hopes for the thesis, and I was surrounded by people who had authored books on Gothic literature and even edited the The New Critical Idiom series on the subject, but during the research phase, I stopped believing in the subject matter.

Then I saw Guillermo del Toro's steam-punk vampire tale, Cronos and I was interested in the Gothic all over again. My appetite whetted, I even reread Anne Rice's Lestat books, two of them at least, and even partly resumed my studies, for my own benefit, and then, well, nothing much happened for the longest time, until that is, Let the Right One In appeared. My God, that is one seedy book. The movie of the book, which is brilliantly acted, is less seedy, but disturbing on many levels, especially if one has read the book beforehand, which many of the reviewers had clearly failed to do.

And now, along comes the TV adaptation of Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Mysteries, featuring Sookie Stackhouse, surely one of the most determined and daring heroes in any literature. In the TV adaptation, by Alan Ball, the creative genius behind the movie American Beauty, and the TV series Six Feet Under (surely the closest TV has ever come to creating art), the part of Sookie Stackhouse is played by Anna Paquin, the very versatile Oscar-winning actor who played the part of Holly Hunter's daughter in Jane Campion's marvelous The Piano, and Rogue in the X-Men movies.

The opening credits for the series, created by the same firm that created the opening credits for Six Feet Under, Digital Kitchen, are absolutely spectacular, and the theme song Bad Things, by Jace Everett, are really helping create the right buzz for the show. I have to say, looking at the True Blood merchandise on HBO's site, and the Digital Kitchen credits and the outline of the creative process on their website, I am really impressed by the ultra-professional way the various teams get right behind an idea they believe in, in the US. There is a sense that there is a well-oiled machine at work, but I don't mean that in a pejorative way, you don't loose sight of the individuals behind the project, it's just that all their talents seem to have been pooled together to create this juggernaut; from the author of the original books, to the screenplay writers, to the direction, to the acting, and the lighting, and the music and the mood, it's an all out attack on the senses. It's one very seductive package. The only worry I have is that Gothic is a romance genre, and very melodramatic and even when the melodrama is tinged with irony and humour it can still seem a little OTT. Hopefully though, the savvy viewers will stick with it as by about episode 8 of the first season True Blood really finds its feet. No spoilers, but season 2 is even better.



The one gripe I often have when a series like True Blood takes of in such a spectacular fashion, and I'm sure it's not one that the authors in that happy position share, is that book covers change to suit the new readers the shows or movies attract. A case in point would be the fantastic P.G Wodehouse covers by Ionicus, that one can only find in second-hand bookshops or vintage book emporiums or whatever they call themselves nowadays. It would be a shame if the same thing were to happen to the marvelous covers created by Lisa Desmini for Haris's books. There is something captivating about Desmini's drawings, and much as I like the series there is no way photos can capture the same magic.

I have to say, I was delighted to find that Lisa Desmini is making prints of her artwork available online here at her site. I'd actually quite like side by side copies with and without the lettering, but that's me. I think my favourite cover is A Touch of Dead. It shows Sookie perched precariously on top of a gravestone she is perched between life and death, between the land and the sky, between the Earth and the moon. It is a marvelous illustration.

You'll find a goodly number of True Blood sites out there but you could do worse than starting here at Loving True Blood in Dallas.

Comic Book Cultures: France

I've looked enviously at the French love affair with comics several times over the years. When I was very young, before I was interested enough in comics to discover that Herge was from Belgium and not France, I thought all the major cartoonists were born there; the European ones at least. Of course I later found out that many major European cartoonists, and those from further afield, had simply, naturally, gravitated toward France, a natural home for artists, and, it seems, a natural home for cartoonists. From Herge, to Hugo Pratt, to Ronald Searle, to Crumb, and to Gilbert Shelton, that migration toward the place continues even today.

In the UK, we cartoonists, perhaps with two exceptions (no more), are artistic pariahs. The lone arts programme on independent terrestrial television, The South Bank Show, now cancelled, was more likely to feature a dancing-bear as an artist, than a cartoonist. Like Newsnight Review, our "other" arts programme, from the BBC, The South Bank Show figured there were maybe two or three cartoonists in the UK, Ronald Searle (living in France), Scarfe, and Posey. They are, of course, two very different sorts of arts programme, The South Bank show, chaired by Melvin Bragg, focused on one artist or movement at a time, whilst the BBC programme consists of a panel of arty-types, almost always journalists, poets, authors, or sculptures, curiously enough. Think, the London/Notting Hill village and you will have a mental picture of the usual panelists.

Newsnight Review is more of an arts magazine, and more like the French model of discursive TV, and it constantly reviews movies and TV shows based on comic book characters. Now, you might think that on the odd occasion the show actually does feature the work of cartoonists that it might have the odd cartoonist on the panel discussing the merits of the work, but no, it just doesn't happen. In fact, I have my doubts that the researchers even realise that much of the material these poets and journalists and sculptures review is written and drawn by UK cartoonists. As I said, we cartoonists are the pariahs of the arts world.

The position of cartoonists in the UK is solidified by the absence of cartoonists and cartoons not just from Britain's art shows on TV, and newspapers and magazines (with obvious exceptions), but also from artistic debates, art magazines and galleries. With the exception of Computer Arts, which occasionally mentions maybe Peanuts in a passing article on merchandising, I can't really think of one magazine that has ever devoted time and space to the artform. Oh there has been the odd review and even the odd 4 or even 8 page piece on French or US cartoonists, like Sempe or Chris Ware in the broadsheets over here, but those are mainly puff-pieces by trendy hipster journalists trying to appear geekily cool. The same people ensure that lots of ill-informed column inches are devoted to the most talked-about graphic novels and even manga, but those always seem to have been squeezed in for novelty value amongst the "real" literature.

Over in France, meanwhile, The Musée de la Bande Dessinée, in Angoulème, the town that hosts the celebrated comic book festival every January, has been granted full status as a Museum of France; so it ranks alongside The Louvre, not just in the public imagination but also in officialdom. Not that there has ever been a great distinction between comic art and any other art in France. Indeed, The Louvre itself recently celebrated comics art, the 'ninth art', with an exhibition of original drawings and paintings by some very famous bédéistes (Bande Dessinées creators). The new museum, with thousands of original drawings and more than 100,000 magazines and comic books, will also function as a reference library, storing every comics publication published in France. And fortunately for the museum's director, not all the 34 million graphic publications the French consume every year are published there.

In France, there is no suggestion at all that cartoons are such low art that neither they nor their creators should be seen and heard. The French magazine, Beaux Arts is the sort of publication I imagine we will never see in the UK. It is an arts and culture magazine that will discuss Fauvism in one issue, Expressionism in another, Bande Dessinee (graphic novels) in another, and Manga in another. It is simply accepted that cartoons are art and that the cartoonists who create the work are artists.

It is the recent manga edition of Beaux Arts hors serie, Qu'est-Ce Que le manga? that, for me, really illustrates the lack of interest in cartoons, of respect for cartoonists, and of inquisitiveness and interest about the artform amongst the literati in the UK. It is, perhaps, this manga edition, more than those that have focused on Band Dessinee that illustrates the poverty of Britain's art scene. It is unimaginable that such a magazine with such an in depth discussion of the history and role of manga would be published in the UK.

Edited by Claude Pommereau, the manga edition of the magazine celebrates the artform looking back at the history of manga, and forward to the new wave of mangaka. From an examination of the ubiquitous role of manga in Japanese life and culture, the magazine looks at different genres and looks back to link the art of Hokusai with the venerable movement. The overview of the artform, in this context, makes it almost impossible to argue that comic books are not art and it goes some way to illustrating the poverty of thinking on these shores.

In addition to an examination of the culture of manga, and a small history of manga there are liberal illustrated examples, including a gorgeous reproduction of a Walking Man piece, by Jiro Taniguchi and an episode of Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack, both of which are 'un-mirrored' and should be read right to left. In addition, they are printed backwards through the magazine - better to enjoy the real Japanese-style experience of reading manga. The 'Walking Man' page below, is the final page of this excerpt.

Like Walking Man, this wonderful Black Jack adventure, the tattoo man or man with tattoo, ends with the first page you see. For die-hard Tezuka fans this excerpt is a delight, and there is little doubt in my mind that it looks so fresh and vibrant that it must also serve to bring new fans to worship at the feet of 'the god of manga'.

With some excellent pieces on the masters of manga, the current crop of young masters, and the enfent terribles of manga, this edition of the magazine goes some way to explaining why you seldom hear any French cartoonists say 'I don't like manga', as many of their British and American counterparts do. Let me explain what I mean by that, whenever a cartoonist from Britain or America says 'I don't like manga' they invariably mean they do not like a particular genre of manga and, unsurprisngly, that genre is usually the genre of manga created for young girls aged 8-13. It is difficult to imagine the well-informed French cartoonist, and no doubt a good deal of the wider comics loving French public, if this magazine is anything to go by, mistaking one genre of manga for all Japanese comic books.

Beaux Arts magazine really does bring home to me that there is an almost unbridgeable chasm here in the UK, not between the reading public and the creators of comic books, graphic novels, BD and manga, but between the gatekeepers of the British Art World (including publishers) and the rest of the planet. Britain is fast becoming a cultural wasteland, obsessed with the sort of ephemeral souless art that the toxic banks hung in their foyers, and the prattle-filled thoughts of celebrity "authors". No wonder our cartoonists and illustrators and writers increasingly look elsewhere for support. You'll have noticed, I hope, that while the French have 'les bédéistes', and the Japanese have 'mangaka', Britain has no word to describe a cartoonist or illustrator who is skilled and experienced in the creation of comic art.

Let's Go Dutch

I don't want to get involved in all that "green shoots" hype that the morons (bankers and politicians) who screwed up the World's finances try to spin to us; but I do feel a little more upbeat every time I come across a country that seems visually-literate, and still provides an outlet for cartoonists in these hard times.




The Dutch comic, EPPO, has had more than one incarnation, and over the years it has published many great strips by great cartoonists, including Aloys Oosterwijk, Gerard(Gleever)Leever and Peter de Wit. The latest incarnation of EPPO Stripblad, launched in January of this year, is seen by some though, as a retrograde step, an attempt at reviving a form of comic that is no longer fashionable, overtaken in popularity, as it has been, by the graphic novel and the bande dessinée. It is a familiar story, and it is one that I hope has a happy ending because, like most every cartoonist out there, I want there to be as many markets as possible for our work.

I'm sure that the UK cartoonists out there will see the similarities between India's Comic Digest(see blog below) and EPPO Stripblad, and old IPC and DC Thomson titles. The major difference between the Indian publications and EPPO and the old British titles is that the Indian titles rely more heavily on syndicated US strips, rather than European work. In many ways India's Comic Digest is more like a US Sunday Funny insert, with one or two old IPC pages thrown in. Whereas EPPO Stripblad, with its Belgian influences, is more like IPC's Giggle Comic (see earlier blog here) than its Indian counterpart.

The lead comic in EPPO, Storm and Red Hair, is an example of the science fantasy comic series that has proved so popular in Europe over the post-war decades. It was originally drawn by the great Don Lawrence.

Eric Heuvel's January Jones, is a comic set in the 1930s, about a female pilot. The series was written by Martin Lodewijk and was published in the magazine Sjosji until the late 1990s.

The main force behind De Partners is illustrator and scriptwriter Dick Matena, who in addition to writing scenario's for the Carry Brugamn illustrated De Partners, also wrote for the Don Lawrence illustrated Storm (he also illustrated the Storm mini-series Kronieken van de Tussentijd).

Franka, the story of a Dutch, female, detective, is a very popular Dutch comic book series, and strip cartoon, by Henk Kuijpers.

Uco Egmond is one of the two EPPO cartoonists who can be likened to Britain's Leo Baxendale, in comic creator terms. From his debut with the gag strip Eppo in the magazine Pep, his work has been a constant. When the magazines Pep and Sjors merged in the 1970s, they became Eppo Magazine, named after Egmond's character. He co-created De Leukebroeders along with Peter Coolen and together they work under the pseudonym, Peco.

Dick Heins is another prolific cartoonist who in addition to working on Kleine Napoleon with Frank Jonker, inks and colours Uco Egmond's Eppo strip.

The team behind the Belgian comic series Plunk, a series of wordless stories about a little pink alien with green trousers and a green hat, from the planet Smurk, are Luc Cromheecke and Laurent Letzer. Plunk, created somewhat ironically as an experiment on behalf of the Belgian Centre for Comic Strip Art as an example of cartoon merchandising, became a very popular strip in its own right, was collected in several albums, and was republished in Spirou Magazine.

Kim Duchateau is just one of a group of talented new young Belgian comic artists. His comic, Esther Verkest, is also published in other magazines besides EPPO.

Bob Evers is the work of writer Frank Jonker, and illustrator Hans van Oudenaarden. There are some marvelous pics and a lot of info' about creating the new BOB EVERS comic books, on the pair's blog here, in English.

Flippie Flink is of course Beetle Bailey. It's a popular strip all over the world. They must be doing something right.

Havank, by Daan Jippes, is a series of exciting detective stories.

Jean-Marc van Tol, of Fokke & Sukke fame, is also the artist of the comic series Kort en Triest, on which he works with Herman Roozen.

De Stamgasten is by the other EPPO cartoonist who can be likened to Leo Baxendale, Toon (Antonie Marcel) Van Driel. His many great creations for Eppo, Eppo/Wordt Vervolgd and Sjors en Sjimmie Stripblad, the daily press, and television, all combined to see him awarded the Stripschapprijs, the most important Dutch comic award.

And finally Eppo, by Uco Egmond, coloured by Kliene Napoleon's Dick Heins.

Over all, I think the balance of Eppo Stripblad is really nice, it amounts to a pleasing, enjoyable and funny read. It's also great to look at, and not stuffed to the gills with syndicated US strips. I'd love to see this sort of publication over here in the UK, supporting some new UK strips, which might in turn help foster an appetite amongst UK comic fans for volumes of work featuring their favourite characters. I've also long been an advocate of this sort of publication appearing as an insert in US papers, funding the publisher with national adverts, and the newspapers with local adverts. Perhaps, as the amount of print publications continues to diminish, and those that are left drop their comic strips, it will be a business model that someone might want to take a long, hard, look at, again.

Writing Autobiographical Comics

They can be really self-indulgent, autobiographical comics, but that's really because the "I" of the story is right there in your face, illustrated, coming at you. The character, because even in an autobiographical comic the "I" of the story is a character, is no more, and more than likely a lot less, self indulgent than say, Salinger's Holden Caulfield - but of course The Catcher in the Rye is a "real book". For some reason even members of the cartooning community, many of whom create comics themselves, cannot get their heads round the fact that autobiography can be used as a method of telling a story, rather than simply being a vehicle for telling a truth. It is not a new concept, and there is nothing dishonest about it; it is a method of storytelling that clergymen have utilised in Saturday and Sunday sermons for hundreds of years; "a funny thing happened to me on my way to worship today...". It is simply about placing a character, yourself, at the centre of the story you wish to tell, in much the same that one does when one relates an urban legend: "this really happened, I know because it happened to me...".


It is commonplace in fiction to use autobiographical and biographical details of people one has met, and one knows, in order to make the fictional characters more lifelike. It is also common in "non-fiction" to embroider stories, or to inflate the role of certain individuals. It is very common, more so than you might imagine, to discover that what was supposed to be an accurate Primary source, on which the history of an event was based, was actually partial, and part-fiction. It is also just a quirk of human nature that memory is unreliable, and so we change the order of events, and even the importance of our role in what happened, frequently over the years whenever we retell the story of ourselves, to ourselves. This is not a conscious attempt to deceive, it happens because the narrative of our lives is written in shifting sands.


Now, many of you (regular readers know what that is code for) have asked if many of the things that happened to my cousin Allan and I actually did happen. Well, yes they did; I believe. And more than one person has asked if my cousin Allan actually exists, or if he is a figment of my imagination, like E.J Thrib's friend Keith. Well, yes he does; here's a recent photograph of him modelling the latest fashion in Inverness:

British Culture, Anime, Corto Maltese, and Reefer Jackets

I followed a link on Journalista (required reading, every day) that lead to yet another Guardian article on comics culture. This time it was about manga, well more specifically anime based on manga. The article is called Why is anime invisible on British TV? and it looks at the cultural differences between Britain and Japan that might help explain why Britain's TV schedule is now devoid of manga - after the demise, of course, of Anime Central. The premise of the article seems to be that animation aimed at anyone other than children is doomed to fail in the UK because we are Disneyfied. I'm going to call shenanigans on that.

The article lacks any depth or insight into why British TV has such a paucity of anime, save for the quote from Emily Man from Orbital Comics, who says "The UK censorship laws have made it extremely hard for the networks in the UK to show Japanese anime on TV too, our societies' tastes and cultural history are different." This is definitely a truism, but the "cultural history" that has disconnected some adults from appreciating animation, including anime (remember one hell of a lot of adults in the UK watch The Simpsons, South Park, and King of the Hill), had nothing to do with Disney (a point made in the article), and everything to do with the stranglehold a couple of British companies had on the indigenous British comics industry.

The success of the Japanese anime industry is inextricably linked with the popularity of manga, and as we have discussed here in a number of posts in the past, the Japanese manga industry has thrived because of the method of production and the primacy of the manga creator. The Japanese public have grown up reading comics, and have progressed through the ranks of the different genres targeted at males and females and children, teens, and adults. It is actually difficult to imagine an occupation, a way of life, a hobby, or a past time, that is not reflected in manga's broad range of subjects, from adventure, romance, sports, history, comedy, science fiction, horror, business and commerce, fishing, tennis, football, basketball, being a teacher, a wine critic, a butler, a shop owner, a baker, every gamut of society is catered for, and almost nobody is excluded.

I've written before about the organic way that much manga finds its audience. A serial like Monster or Death Note, begins in a manga magazine fighting for its audience alongside a lot of other stories, and its success leads to the collected chapters of the story being republished in book-form ( Tankobon). If a manga series is popular enough, as both Monster and Death Note were, it may be animated, and the process that leads to this stage practically guarantees financial backing because the readership or viewing figures are already proven.

I'm not going to suggest that had the British comics industry mirrored that of Japan we would also have manga cafés, where people can drink coffee and read manga all night. In that respect I suspect our cultural differences do matter, but I am going to suggest that if it had mirrored the Japanese model, British TV would not only be airing a lot of anime today, but it would also be airing a great deal more British animation. I'm convinced that with a different British comics industry, anime as good as Monster and Death Note, and animation on a par with King of the Hill and The Simpsons, would have been made and produced over here.

Anyway, there I was thinking about the different methods of comic production in different countries, and I happened upon the French magazine, Monsieur; which caught my eye because it had a Hugo Pratt drawing of Corto Maltese on the cover. Those of you who read my article on Corto Maltese on the Forbidden Planet UK blog, will know that I just had to pick the thing up. Also, and you may not know this about me, I'm a bit of a clothes horse (I'm wearing blue deck shoes and a stripey pirate top at the moment, and my Reefer jacket has anchors on the buttons) and since I know that all things nautical are de rigeur for men, currently, I didn't need to call on my very poor French to work out that Corto Maltese was being featured here as a fashion icon. looking at Monsieur, I just couldn't help thinking that this sort of love affair, with Bande Dessinee, or graphic novels, evidenced in the illustrated review of Piscine Molitor and the gorgeous Hugo Pratt reproductions, just wouldn't happen over here in the UK, with any degree of heart-felt honesty.

A quick update, Spirtofcorto left a message and I nipped over to the site and there is some great Corto Maltese info over there (really nice blog), including the new edition of Celtiques and a good look at the Corto Maltese line: Spirit of Corto.

There's Only One Nickelodeon Magazine

When it comes to the creative arts it is never, or at least seldom, a good idea to dissect how you work. A great many people tend to shy away from doing so in case the analysis of the method leads to something happening, perhaps some spark vanishing, or maybe some unconscious secret becoming conscious and then unavailable. At some risk then (you are on the edge of your seat, right?) I'm going to divulge a part of the cartooning process that happens before one commits even one line to paper.

Before sending any cartoons to a publication, you must familiarise yourself with it. So you look up current copies and old copies and even vintage copies of the publication, and you begin to look for common themes. On a superficial level, you are simply trying to find out if you can work out what the Cartoon Editor of the publication likes; on a deeper level, you are conducting a close reading of the cartoons in order to imagine how the Cartoon Editor thinks, and trying to imagine what the Cartoon Editor's ideal cartoon might be. Now this is not too difficult with themed publications, like fly-fishing Monthly, the chances are you will be on target with a cartoon about fishing, but it is a dark art with more cosmopolitan and varied titles. When I was planning to send to Playboy my friend and fellow cartoonist Mike Lynch sent me a really thick envelope stuffed with pages of Playboy cartoons, which I glued together onto a lot of boards. Once I had those boards in front of me, I went over and over them, trying to think myself into a "playboy" frame of mind. When I was convinced I had done so, I created a batch of cartoons for them.

Now there are two ways of looking at this, it is either a strange voodoo-like technique that cartoonists employ to read the Cartoon Editor's mind, or it is simply a very practical example of the old adage of "being familiar with your markets". I'm inclined to think it is the latter, but it does sometimes feel a little strange when it works well. Years back, when The National Enquirer was a cartoon market, I sent a submission from the UK and the Editor sent me back a bunch of examples of the cartoons they had used; again, I used these examples to think myself into the magazine. To be honest, in that case it was more a case of realising the publication used what we call "general cartoons". But there you go, not a secret and hardly mind blowing - research your market and target the publication with work it can use.

So, having heard good things about Nickelodeon Magazine (US), I decided to get a hold of the thing and go over it with a fine tooth-comb, and try to think my way into the thing. The thing was, I had no idea what to expect, it was a kids magazine after all. Well, I was astonished when I saw it, really astonished. I'm not kidding, I was really bowled over by the magazine, I had never seen a publication more visually literate, more cartoon and illustration friendly, it was a cartoonist's delight. Imagine what was going through my mind; I was expecting maybe a gags page, or maybe a comics page or two, or maybe some sort of comic related to the Nickelodeon shows, but I was not expecting page after page after page of illustrations and gags and puzzles - page after page of fun.

As I looked through the magazine, I found myself responding to it with the same levels of wonder and delight as a cartoonist, as a parent, and as a teacher. I had never seen anything like this, and I had never seen such a range of mainstream and indie cartoonists all gathered together in one publication.

If anything, there was just too much opportunity, there was the chance to be an illustrator, a gag cartoonist, a comic artist, a colourist, there was a chance to create puzzles and quizzes. I had just started, in those days, to look to the US for cartooning opportunities and here, in this one publication, I could see dozens. Of course I knew it wasn't likely to be the case, and indeed it wasn't, but what if all the kids publications in the US were like this?

Not only that, but I could see the opportunity to get out of my funk. I wasn't feeling to great about being a cartoonist at that time, but now I could maybe recast myself as a cartoonist creating the sort of work I would like to read. In the UK a couple of my markets had dried up, there was effectively no comics industry, and here I might have the opportunity to create work that would appear alongside the work of Charles Burns, one of my cartooning heroes. What an opportunity.

Sadly, that opportunity will not be around for much longer. Nickelodeon Magazine is often referred to, in cartooning circles, as the New Yorker for kids. If you had never seen the magazine, you might consider that hyperbole, but I have little doubt that after seeing it you would know you were looking at a very superior publication. When the magazine ceases publication at the end of the year it will be missed, by a great many children and adults, and a good many cartoonists and illustrators. Perhaps it signals an end of an era in print cartooning; perhaps we will never see the likes of Nickelodeon Magazine again.

In this issue alone, from 2004, you can find the work of, amongst others, Charles Burns, Wayno Honath, Steve Ryan, Craig Thompson, Jason Lutes, Nick Bertozzi,Jason Shiga, Kaz, Ellen Fornay, Jen Sorensen, Johnny Ryan, David Sheldon,Jordan Crane, Robert Leighton and Sam Henderson. Over the years, amongst others, the magazine would also feature the work of Scott McCloud, Aaron Augenblick, Scott Cunningham, Dan Moynihan, Mark Martin, Terry Laban, Michael Kuperman, Scott Roberts, Andi Watson, Bobby London, Charice Mericle, C.H. Greenblat, Bob Flynn, Meg Hunt, Richard Thompson, Pat Moriarity, Jef Czekaj and Sherm Cohen. But that is just a random selection of names, however talented, and the creative team behind Nick Mag, lead by Christopher Duffy and Dave Roman, are the real stars behind the magazine's success; they will be sadly missed. If there is any justice, they will find themselves at the helm of an equally important magazine before too long.

The names above, with links, take you to examples of work from Nick Mag.

True Story, Swear to Blog.

This actually happened, except that part of it didn't. It was a rugby night, we were playing the Welsh, and my cousin and I eventually wound up on Lothian Road in search of a good Brandy (VSOP). We did get locked in the cinema and the owner had to set us free.

It's a story that sounds like it should be exciting, but I think you really had to be there because getting locked in a movie theatre after a horror fest really has to be experienced.

Oh yeah, cut us some slack, neither of us has smoked for many years but in 1981 everybody smoked. Ach, you know...sometimes I still think about having a puff, and I gave up for good about 12 years ago.

Nickelodeon Magazine, US, Bows Out

This is a real bummer. I'll scan some stuff from my favourite copy. This is really horrible news for all the staff, especially Chris and Dave who have done so much for cartoonists over the years.

Cartooning in India, Part 2

In this second part of our look at Indian comic (I wasn't sure whether to describe Comic Digest and Comic World as comic books, comic strip collections or cartoon books, so I plumped for comic books) publications, principally those published by Diamond Comics, we are going to concentrate on the strips made in the US and the UK. The few UK strips, with the notable exception of Kettle and Christine's Beau Peep, are old pages from IPC's now defunct juvenile comics division. Unlike the old British comics the pages of Bewitched Belinda, Junior Rotter, and Joker came from, however, there seems to be little or no influence from Spanish, Belgian and Argentinian cartoonists. Unless, that is, those cartoonists from those countries who did so much work for IPC, are responsible for some of the reprinted horror or romance stories from the publications they worked for in the US.

I won't lie to you, at face value a publication like Comics Digest is probably the ideal publication from a cartoonist's point of view. That is, of course, providing, the magazine hasn't got a no contact with cartoonists outside the agencies it deals with policy in place. If it is actually in the market for new material, however infrequently, then it promises work and a large audience for a number of cartoonists, at a time when publications in the west are actually removing or dropping cartoons and comic strips. Providing it doesn't rely on a cosy deal with just one or two syndicates, then Comic Digest actually greatly resembles the sort of publication cartoonists like me have wished for some time. In some circles, cartoonists will often describe a publication that looks like a cross between a British comic and a Sunday Funny, full of colour comic strips and full pages, designed to be inserts for newspapers, or, and this would be in our wildest dreams, stand-alone publications.

Of course Comic Digest is not without faults: the production values sometimes slip and the lettering of some pages can be pretty poor, and there is a tendency to over-colour, I think. It also sort of amazes me that the publication actually does carry a feature like Junior Rotter, not that I don't like Trevor Metcalfe's drawings, it's just that it seems so odd to see a two-page Junior Rotter adventure rubbing shoulders wit Flash Gordon, Archie, and Calvin and Hobbes. Not that the quality of the work looks out of place, mind you, it's just that those are syndicated strips and JR is a character from a British comic. I really can't imagine who would be syndicating or supplying the work.

You know, I'm really very pleased about these publications because they tell me that India has the sort of respect for comics and cartoon strips that has been so lacking, over the years, here in the UK. Not that it should come as such a surprise, historically India has always had more respect for the visual language than we have, a fact I touched on in a post I made a while back about The Ramayana and the origins of the graphic novel, and the fact that the Indian comic book readers have good English and a liking for British and US comics is good reason for we cartoonists to look toward the Indian continent with a degree of optimism. The Indian market is a growing market, within a healthy economy, and there is surely reason to believe, if Comic World and Comic Digest are anything to go by, that there is likely to be an increasing demand for what we cartoonists have to offer. Needless to say, I hope, that we have to be ready and willing to put in the necessary effort to promote our work over there.

Indian Comics and Bollywood

A while back I was looking at a graphic novel from Indian, and it struck me it looked like a sort of Indian version of a Tintin bande dessinée - not that there's anything wrong with that. There was certainly more of a European influence, or at any rate a Belgian influence, than an American one; I thought. It was actually the first original graphic novel I'd seen from India, up until that point I'd only seen the Indian translations of Mandrake the Magician, and The Phantom. Oh, and one or two somewhat strange amalgamations of US superhero characters and Indian ones, working together on superhero business.

As much as I do love the Phantom and Mandrake, especially old adventures, the original work was much more exciting and it encouraged me to pay a little more attention to what is, after all, a very large and increasingly important market for cartoonists.

In fact, the Indian market is not only very large, it is vibrant and still growing. Small wonder then that this potentially lucrative, upwards of $300Mn industry, which publishes somewhere in the region of 125 million comics every year, has attracted interest from Virgin, Marvel Comics, DC Comics, and Disney. But it's the indigenous market that interests we fans of comicdom, because it has grown so phenomenally over the last 4 decades.

For many years, let's call it Pre-Pran Kumar Sharma (Pran), no indigenous comic character appeared in Indian publications alongside American and European strips. That all changed in 1960 when Pran's comic strip, Daabu debuted on the front page of Delhi's Milap. In 1969, Pran went on to develop Chacha Chaudhary, who along with his faithful sidekick Sabu, went on to become the most popular comic character in India. So popular did the character become that the TV adaptation of the comic strip strip ran six days a week, every week. In 1995, Pran was awarded the prestigious 'Man of the Year' award for popularizing comics in India.

Pran's Chacha Cowdrey is handled these days by the biggest indigenous comic book publisher in India, Diamond Comics, who amongst other publications also publish Comic World, a monthly comics magazine,featuring the adventures of amongst others, Archie, Garfield, Dennis The Menace, Beau Peep, Batman, Tarzan, James Bond, and Chacha Chaudhary, and I think British comic artists from IPC may find this a little extraordinary, Junior Rotter - which I think was draw by Trevor Metcalfe for Whizzer and Chips. It has a circulation of more than (I'm going to err on the side of caution here and say 20,000, but I did read it was much higher - any new info' would be much appreciated) copies per month.

In addition to publishing comics, the ever expanding and diversifying Diamond, whose stable of characters includes, Chacha Choudhary, Shrimatiji, Chacha-Bhatija, Mahabali Shaka, Agniputra Abhay and Ankur, has recently joined forces with License India to launch its catalogue as animated features, complete with full character licensing.

It certainly looks as if these are exciting times for comic book and cartoon characters, and indeed cartoonists, in India. Which makes a nice change from the doom-and-gloom over here and across the pond. The news looks similarly good in the field of animation. Just recently, Kids Animation India, part of the larger company Spacetoon India, announced, with the help of Bollywood actress Vidya Balanthat, the launch of its first animated TV series, Fafa & Juno, a cartoon about the adventures of a girl and a panda.

Pic purloined from Prokerala

I just spoke with my friend and fellow blogging cartoonist, Mike Lynch about this post and we touched on the fact our colleague Dan Thomson works for India's leading men's magazine, Royal (remember it is a magazine "for men"; although having said that, it is a very tasteful magazine). You can read Royal online here. He gets a nice credit on the magazine's staff rota too, which is always a nice plus for a cartoonist. I think we should add an example to this post, as it shows that the promising Indian market is also relevant to magazine/gag cartoonists.

All images remain the copyright of their respective copyright holders. Comic World copyright, Diamond Comics.

It's All Downhill From Here

You soon learn, in gag or magazine cartooning, that you don't really know what is funny. The cartoons that make you laugh while you are drawing them, almost invariably don't sell, at least not right away. They probably sell eventually, or after the punchline has changed, but by then you certainly don't find them funny anymore.

I think the average strike rate for cartoonists is quite low; around 10 or 20%, so most cartoonists reckon on selling only 1 or 2 cartoons from a batch of around 10. If you sell more than that, its a good feeling, swiftly followed by a feeling of impending doom. Back in 1982 or 1983, I sent a batch of only 6 cartoons to Punch, and they took 3, or 50%. I knew it was an ill-omen; things could only go downhill from there.

There is something comforting in Cartoon Editors picking only 1 or 2 of your ideas. You have the impression of things ticking along just nicely. As far as you are concerned they are possibly just taking one every week because you are dependable - there isn't too much pressure on you as you sit down to knock out the next batch. Now, you take just one cartoon out of that equation, and you really are under pressure. When you submit regularly to a market that takes one cartoon every time you send and suddenly they no longer take any, then you really begin to panic. Oddly, the reverse is also true; they take three of your cartoons when they usually only take one, and suddenly you are under a whole load of pressure. What does it mean, does it mean you have to raise the bar this late in your career? Can it be that you've peaked, and it is all downhill from here?

So here is a batch I put together back at the end of 2008, before I took ill, and which I really didn't punt much, but which failed to sell. I just wasn't feeling it. Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to drawing the next batch, which should be an interesting exercise as I think I'm drawing differently; again.

You'll notice that these are mainly pencil and some wash and colour; that's because I tend to send roughs, or at least I did last year but I think in the current climate most publications will prefer finishes, so I'm likely go back to sending the finished article.

Although I haven't rushed back into drawing cartoons, I have kept myself busy drawing a strip and redrawing a couple of Tales from Lepertown stories and I'm currently cooking up one or two indie pieces for a couple of projects out there in the wild. Just the other day though, an idea for a cartoon came to me and I scribbled it down and I had another idea earlier today, so I'm pretty sure I'll have 10 over the next day or two and then, with luck, I'll start chucking them out again.

When you can't get what's in your head, out there.

I started drawing cartoons and submitting them to publications when I was very young. I think, in retrospect, that it was a good time to start because at that age it seems so implausible that anyone will actually buy your work that rejection is nothing more than what you expect. The really surprising thing is when someone actually wants to buy one of the drawings.

The first one to appear was I think, in the Sun. It may be that Accountancy Magazine was the first publication to buy a cartoon from me, but it was published monthly, so the Sun was the first to publish one of my cartoons. What surprised me was the revelation, when I actually had in my hand the newspaper in which my first published cartoon appeared, that what was important was not the drawing, or the humour, or the payment that would most assuredly be coming my way, but that my signature wasn't there. I had put it on the right, below the drawing and it had been cut off. I really wanted my name to be there, however small, however illegible. You see, I really did want to be part of the history of newspapers, albeit in a very small, very minor way. I wanted my name to be on a document that I knew would be housed for posterity, as one copy of all British publications were, in The Scottish Library.


Of course, over time my mindset changed, and then I got married, and then our kids came along, and went to school, and our bills grew, and cartooning actually became a job, and the money became important. At that stage there was a disconnect between the cartoons I liked, and the cartoons I drew. I wanted to create work like Clair Bretecher or Jules Feiffer, work that was intelligent as well as funny, but I just wasn't that smart. Oh, I tried, but I hadn't really been around that long and my ideas about people and politics and life in general weren't very sophisticated, and so there developed a fracture, between what I wanted to create, and what I did for a living.


So there I was, dreaming of tilting at windmills, looking at work that I admired and not really knowing why I couldn't make myself create something like it. Of course I know now that there were many reason why I couldn't do it, and I know now that the very act of trying to drive myself to produce it simply compounded the problem, but back then it was always in the back of my mind that whatever I did just wasn't good enough. It is not a healthy way to think, I know, but I was young.

Anyway, one of the magazines I loved and hated in equal measure, because it reminded me how limited my cartooning abilities were/are, was Heavy Metal. More than the superhero comics and the indie comix I collected, because I could convince myself that Ditko and Kirby and Crumb, were all one-offs, Heavy Metal was a constant reminder of just how many talented "one-offs" there were out there.

I mean to say, honestly, just look at that line-up from one issue in 1978, Moebius, Druillet, Forest drawing Barbarella for goodness sake. I really loved the magazine, but it was so infuriating, because I just couldn't see any way to make the leap from the sort of cartooning I did, to this sort of thing. To be completely honest, I had no idea how some of drawings were created. It would be another couple of years before I would figure out Richard Corben used a spray gun. In this issue, for instance, Francois Schuiten's Going to Pieces actually awed me, here was cartooning that was also clearly art. Here was a complete narrative, without words, for adults and children alike, that was so perfect, so realised, that I would just sit and stare at the drawings, and I had no idea how anyone could make illustrations like that happen.

Not that it made a whole lot of difference when I did understand the techniques and the media involved. If anything it was probably more frustrating to see what a cartoonist like Chantal Montellier was able to produce with simply a pen, ink and paper; and of course a brilliant imagination (the piece is eerily prescient, I think). In fact Montellier's 1996 is one of my favourite comics because it is so visually striking and the story always makes me laugh. No wonder the similarly striking artwork of Jaime Hernandez would be so resonant in my later years - when, of course, I sit in front of Love and Rockets thinking "I can never be this good".

Copyright; Metal Hurlant and the various artists and writers detailed on the contents page above.

The Modern Cartooning Office.

I have a Fujitsu Siemens ScaleoP PC and a Fujitsu Siemens Laptop. The Scaleo is linked up with Broadband and an HP Scanner and a printer, but I became a little quirky while I was ill and decided I wasn't keen on the fact that I had to leave my drawing table to go to it; so instead I started using the Laptop with a Cannon scanner and printer nearer my comfort zone. The trouble is, I don't keep all my programmes and plugins on the Laptop. The Scaleo, which is my main computer really, has all my art programmes, Photoshop, PSP, Manga Studio on it, and my good DVD burning software and my FTP progs, essential for shifting large graphic files over the internet, and a lot of scanned and stored artwork. The Laptop is faster, but the wireless connection to the Internet is insecure, so you don't want to be discussing financial details on it.

Well, the Scaleo stopped booting, at least it stopped at the Windows logo at first, and then it just stopped completely, so I had to do everything by Laptop; except that Lisbeth is now using it for her work. Kim came to my rescue, and loaned me her Laptop (which is covered with skull and crossbone stickers) on which I had to create a new profile, for me, and add some software to use it with the printer and the like, and it has been a real spaghetti junction of wires over where I draw.

My neighbour, kind soul that she is, offered me a replacement monitor, but I told her I'd better make sure that I have a monitor problem first, as it could actually be more complicated. So, finding some spare time, I brought the Scaleo through and hooked it up to my TV, although it was quite a struggle finding space between the Wii and the cable TV box and the DVD player. Anyway, I managed to squeeze it in and because the TV, an Orion, can also be used as a monitor without any fancy adaptors and extra leads so I wasn't adding much to the tangle, and booted it into "safe mode".

I couldn't find the problem I'm afraid, and System Restore wouldn't work, so I decided I would export the registry, and save my docs and illos and files, onto a removable disk drive, and then clean install Windows, and then add all my old info. Before doing so, I opened my Device Manager and uninstalled my Radeon Display Adaptor, as a last resort, and then rebooted and blow me if the thing didn't boot up just fine. Now, of course, I have to bring my monitor through, unplug the computer from the TV, try it with its own monitor, and if it works, move the whole shebang back through to where it usually sits.

You know, not so very long ago, it seems, I just needed a pad of paper and a pen and ink.

Oh Crap!!!

My bastard links have all gone because I was poncing about with the template. I am a moron.

It'll take days to put them all back.

So sorry.

Rod.

Well I for one am shocked at that potty-mouth, McKie. As you can see, the links are making their way back. Fool!

The Joys of Sax, and other UK Cartoonists

Weekend Magazine and Titbits Magazine were a lot like America's National Enquirer, but with a lot more cartoons - when the Enquirer did carry cartoons, that is. Alone amongst the two, Weekend sometimes compiled a lot of cartoons into The Weekend Book of Jokes, which was about 70 pages thick and carried 3 or 4 cartoons per page. Of course Weekend didn't pay any of us for second use of the cartoons, or even ask permission to use them, and they kept the original artwork; but nonetheless, the publication was a great market for British cartoonists, a good window for work, and a great place to experiment. That is if you could muscle the great SAX out of the way.

This is a bunch of pages from Weekend No.22 which features a range of great cartoonists, a surprising amount of whom are still with us and still producing great cartoons.

The opening cartoon is by Noel Ford. Noel is a bit of a hero of mine. I wanted to become as good as Noel, but I didn't realise he would spend the decades getting even better. It's sickening really because as you can see from the cartoon above, he never had that awkward development stage, he was always a great cartoonist. What can you do?

I like Roger's cartoon here, but it's next to a SAX. I think SAX influenced more British gag cartoonists than any anyone else, during the 60s the 70s and the 80s. His cartoons were all over all the British papers and Titbits and, of course, Weekend.

Sax again, but the bottom cartoon is nice, it's a Roland Fiddy, who was better known for his Tramps comic strip.

Again Sax, alongside the Sax though is a Paul White cartoon. Paul White drew nice cartoons.

Another brilliant Noel Ford cartoon, and up there beside the SAX cartoon is one by Jim Watson. I really, really, liked Jim Watson's work. I'm pretty certain Jim was/is an American cartoonist who sent a lot of work over here and many of his cartoons appeared in my local paper, the Edinburgh Evening News.
The Doctor Who comic readers will recognise Dicky Howett's work. Dicky, like Jones and David Myers created really original looking cartoons. I think I have a sort of Wabi Sabi liking for that kind of drawing; it's pleasingly wrong - if you get my drift.

Two nice drawings here by Ivor and Frank (Quanda) Holmes. I like Frank, I have one of his original drawings.

These two, alongside the ubiquitous SAX, are by Colin Earl, who seems always to have had those nice fluid lines, and an early Mike Turner (you can tell by the noses).

The top cartoon is by Jones. Suddenly, out of the blue, I got Jones. I got his drawings and his humour.

The top right cartoon is by Jim Crocker, who was also a comics artist. His signature is a "crockerdile"; geddit?
Another really original cartoonist up top there, the great Ray Lowry, no stranger to fans of The Clash and readers of The New Musical Express.

Another Lowry, and top right there, an ALB. ALB's cartoons looked great to me, his lines varied thick and then thin, as though that Crow Quill or Gillot (I'm guessing Crow Quill) nib was being pushed in any direction he chose (not as easy as it sounds). He really seemed to attack the paper and the drawings always looked more substantial as a result.

ALB and SAX, of course, but at the top a nice big Keith Reynolds; again a cartoonist better known for his comic work.

The big ALB cartoon of Noah's Ark takes up most of this page. It's excellent, of course. I tried to get a cartoon by him or at least a print of one of his cartoons from the Daily Mirror. They sent me a bromide, exactly the same size as the cartoon in the paper, about 1.5"x1".

Hah, I didn't like Rali's comic strip "Hamish", in fact I rate it about the worst strip of all time - but I like his cartoon here.


Fiddy and SAX again, but the top cartoon here is one of Kevin Woodcock's wordless specialities. A Woodcock classic is usually wordless, and features trees.

Alongside SAX here are Dish and Barry Knowles. Back then Dish seemed to be inspired by Willie Rushton.

An oldie here by Kim. It's good. The yob looks great.

Another nice Lowry. Couldn't resist this one.

Lowry again, and SAX, but it's the Pete Williams I like here. I always liked Pete's cartoons. Mike Williams is great too, but has a much more controlled line than Pete's.

A brilliant slapstick cartoon here by SAX and another great example of Noel Ford's brilliance.

I think the top one here is a Mike Aitkinson, again, a cartoonist better known for his comic strips and also these days his card lines.

This is a great Ray Lowry and above it a Colin Whittock cartoon. I bought a Colin Whittock original for my cousin Alan (his money).

Another great gag/single-column cartoonist, REX and below I think is a cartoon by Sally Artz.

A nice gag by Acken and another great visual gag by SAX.

This has three great drawings, once again the cartoonist at the top right, Brian Platt, is better known as a comic strip artist and Roy Nixon always created perfect looking cartoons.

Hah, the cartoon on the bottom left is by Gerald Lip, who went on to become the Cartoon Editor for the Daily Express and the Daily Star. Nice guy.

Roy Nixon again and Fiddy and the great Dick Bogie. I have an original by Bogie, from Weekend Magazine, as it happens.

The top one here is by Clew. Clew did a lot of Spot the Difference cartoons. Very funny cartoonist.


The Walker cartoon on the top right here stuck with me. I thought it was very funny and it made me rethink my own writing.

Another great; Dave Parker, bottom left.

I think the top cartoon here is an early Anthony Hutchins. I worked with Anthony on the Buster Comic. His drawings are very bold, very powerful but fluid.

The cartoon on the bottom left is by Nigel Edwards, I think. I also like the top one, it's still funny.

The cartoon above these two is by Nick. I'm not sure when he left these shores so I don't know if he was based in the US or the UK when he sold this one. Nick is a great cartoonist, I think he created Alan Coren's favourite cartoon for Punch back in the 1980s.

The Rees cartoon is still very funny. Rees was a big influence on a lot of cartoonists who read Punch in the 80s.

You know, you tend to overlook the fact that Weekend was a great training ground for cartoonists. I suppose it's because we think of the humour as "general", in perjorative way, but it was a good magazine for cartoonists and it is missed.

The Last of the Great Manga?

Before we go any further let me just make it clear that there are certain aspects of manga that do make me feel uneasy. Firstly, the excessive gore and violence in MPD Psycho, both in the manga and the TV series (I have some details in this older blog post) is certainly not going to be to everyone's liking and I'd have to admit, might be fodder for a certain type of individual to put forward as an influence for their own dark deeds. Having said that, I like the mood of the thing and whilst I'm not advocating censorship, I do find it difficult to envisage the sort of youngster the work would appeal to. However, as the work comes clearly labelled "adult content", I feel that should be enough of a heads-up for the average supervising adult. I'm telling you this so that you are aware that I didn't just read the series and watch the TV show without registering some disquiet - I'm not ever what you would call a passive viewer.

Even more disquieting for me though, on a personal level, is not the violence in some manga, or even the porn manga, which I personally don't bother with, much, but a technique used in a lot of manga to signify embarrassment or belittling, literally, by drawing the adult characters, or one of the adult characters, as children or a child. I find this very unsettling when it happens in a story where I've accepted the characters as adults. Oh, I know it's a technique some Japanese illustrators use, but I personally dislike it very much, especially if it happens in a manga that includes, er, bodily interaction or those frequent up-skirt angles. Heck, I don't even like it in the more mild knicker-showing stories like Change123 - which is otherwise fun.





Hopefully it's clear then that I do find fault with some manga, and I'm not blind to the fact that there is as much pap-manga as there is superpower-pap indie-pap and pap-graphic novels.

Anyway, that said, I got to thinking about the amount of posts out there hypothesizing about the death of manga, or at any rate those suggesting that there is no new great manga being created. The posts reminded me of a phenomena that the poet and critic Tom Paulin pointed out at the turn of the Millennium, when quite a lot of writers began to produce a lot of work that focused on sleeping. It is sort of zeitgeist moment, coupled now, as it was then, with a sort of quasi-New Testament panic about a possible end-of-days. It struck me that such thinking is understandable, because we do seem to have come to the end of a particular cycle, with the likes of Death Note, and Monster, and MPD Psycho, completely finishing. After all, in one form or another, whether available only from Japan or as scanlations following their publication in the weekly or fortnightly or monthly Japanese comics, these titles were around, literally, for decades. And now, having finished their run in Japan, and having been removed from scanlation sites as they appeared in full volumes here in the West, there is something final about their disappearance.

Not that the genius behind Monster, Naoki Urasawa, has stopped producing work, he has followed 20th Century Boys and Monster and Pluto, with Billy Bat, which I wrote about at some length on a post below. I've been keeping up with the story and there is little doubt in my mind that "the god of manga" has created another classic, although it was a safe bet that he would. In a sense, although it is, strictly speaking, less so than than the current manga that explore the job of working as a mangaka, it is also very self-referential in that it is a story based around a fictional comic book character, and a manga creator.








Just as Urasawa has a new title that is developing nicely, so to does the team behind Death Note, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. Unlike Billy Bat, Bakuman deals directly with the business of aspiring to become a mangaka, bringing us the story of Moritaka Mashiro, a high school student and the nephew of a man who was himself a mangaka.

So, exactly why, with new titles by some of the leading figures in manga really getting into their stride, and with some great new titles out there, is there so much gloom about the art form? Well, I suppose, at least partly, it has something to do with the self-referential nature of some of the stories. Manga is often very, very, imaginative, very out-there, and seeing so many titles looking inward may have caused a sense of panic in some circles - maybe. And of course there is the steady decline in manga sales in Japan, that might have added to the sense of foreboding; but then surely that downward trend is counterbalanced by the increase of sales of manga on phones and handheld readers. Then there is the increasing cherry-picking by some publishers who seem to conduct their research and development by hanging around the scanlation sites and the comics scene, to find out what is hot. As soon as they step in and option a title, the thing gets pulled from the scanlation sites (a gentleman's agreement that most scanlation groups adhere rigidly to) and so the reader who has already gone to some lengths to find the thing ends up with a hiatus between the most recent scan, and the first western publication which covers the story the reader has already consumed, and invariably the interest in the title drops. I mean to say, how long have we had to sit and wait for the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service volumes to trickle out?

I suppose, to be honest, that there must also be a certain amount of disenchantment involved in these posts. After all, many of these writers discovered manga like Death Note years before it appeared in the West, and then became ubiquitous as merchandise and anime and as live action movies, and they wrote a great many posts extolling its virtues and the virtues of manga in general. And perhaps there is no need to do so now, or at least they may feel there is no longer any need to do so, now that the mainstream press is sniffing around. It is, perhaps, not so much that there is no new great manga being produced, but that there is no longer any great need to try to impress upon the reading public that manga is great. They are preaching to the converted, not only that but they are preaching to those whom they themselves converted, and the converted have all gone their separate ways.

Whether you or I think it is a great manga or not, a title like Antique Bakery deserves its place in the manga firmament. It is a popular manga, and it is well drawn and to be honest, it is just another one of those ideas that at first glance seems unlikely to appeal to us in the west, and actually turns out to be a complete joy. To dismiss work like this out-of-hand because we don't like the way the eyes are drawn or for some equally idiosyncratic reason, is just plain silly, it is clearly work executed by an expert hand.

What I'm trying to say, in a round-about way, is that it is no coincidence that the much-missed titles are all Seinen manga, and what the writers who miss some of this Seinen manga seem to forget is that a diet of nothing but Seinen manga may not be everybody's cup of tea. The reader may well have have been turned on to manga by one gateway Seinen title, like Death Note or Monster, but they may well, by now, have moved on and decided that they prefer Shonen titles. In fact I'm sure we all hope they have moved on and discovered what a broad church manga is.

The fact that the much-missed titles all seem to be Seinen manga, actually got me thinking that this worry, that the really great manga has come to an end, might actually just be a perceived problem for male readers of a certain age - of which I am one (both a fan of Seinen manga and a male reader of a certain age). After all, one look at my previous manga-related posts over the years, is a clear illustration that I veer toward Seinen titles:

http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/03/monster-will-astonish-you.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/03/work-of-jiro-taniguchi.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/03/ykk-alpha-at-end-of-world.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/03/kurosagi-corpse-delivery-service.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/06/takeo-saitos-golgo13-kimonos-and-bad.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/07/death-note-re-post.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/09/astro-boy-mighty-atom.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2007/07/where-to-begin.html

However, if you are familiar with those old posts, or if you clicked them, you'll know that I don't just read Seinen and horror manga, and that is what has given me, I think, a particular perspective on these events. For this perspective, I give the credit, or blame, to Dirk Deppey's deep knowledge of manga, and his championing, in particular, of Ashinano Hitoshi's dream-like, post-apocalyptic, sci-fi, romance, manga, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (YKK). My exposure to this story, created over a period of 12 years and still not optioned in the west so the scans are still available (here), helped position me, I think, to appreciate a wider range of work like Nana, Honey and Clover, and Walking Man, and brought me to a slow appreciation of manga's huge sweep and broad canvas. It also helped me to realise that the titles some of the critics' miss so much, are not necessarily the titles that the majority of manga readers actually read. In fact the current "crisis" has probably not even registered with the readers of manga that coexists in both the East and the West, such as Nana. And those who have just started reading manga titles like Soul Eater, or Spray King, or Moyashimon, or Oshinbo, or Astral Project, have probably never seen or read anything so exciting.

No, the great manga has not stopped, it continues in an unbroken chain that eventually winds its way to our shores, and it takes different forms and slips between genres of manga. YKK is a great manga, a great voluminous sprawling epic that meanders peacefully towards its final chapter. It is nothing like Monster, which is nothing like Death Note, which is nothing like Nana which is nothing like Billy Bat which is nothing like Homunculous which is nothing like Mushishi which is nothing like Until Death Do Us Part (UDDUP) which is nothing like Moyashimon: Tales of Agriculture. In other words the great manga is still out there, if we don't recognise it that says more about us, than it does about the state of manga. I mean, be honest, if someone suggested that you might like a manga called Tales of Agriculture, you would be a little skeptical, until you actually caught a glimpse of the fantastic artwork and then started to read the thing that is.










To be honest, I also think there is something else going on, an undercurrent if you will; a subtext, perhaps one that the authors of the pieces are themselves unaware of. It just might be that Tom Paulin's observation can be applied here, and the blog writers are all displaying a end-of-days style panic, based not just on fact that a few great stories have come to an end, but also on the fact that printed comic books are being replaced by digital comics. To people of a certain generation, and again I am also one of those, that really does represent the end of an era. There was always something elemental about making marks on pulped wood with a liquid that itself came from deep beneath the earth. Perhaps, and I'm only surmissing here, the bloggers concerned cannot with any certainty look 10 years down the line and see any future at all for comic books, let alone "great" status for a title like Detroit Metal Blues.

Then again, perhaps I am just reading too much into it. After all, I noticed a reply to a post on the TCJ forum that more or less suggested that the "big-eyed manga", as the poster called it, is the wrong kind of manga. Which informs us that the poster is either completly unfamiliar with manga classics like Black Jack and Astro Boy, or has probably only ever read a limited amount of Seinen manga, and decided that is the only style of manga that counts. It is, I think, to be sure, befuddled way thinking, but it may be no more than a failure on the part of some people to embrace titles that look a little different from the ones they usually pick up. Perhaps, it really is no more than that.

Once More into the...and all that.

Hi, things are going well, so I'm going to start dipping my toes into the blogging-pond again - on a weekly basis at first.

Before I became ill I was working on some posts that focused on all the things that were going wrong in the world of cartooning; and all the new possibilities that were opening up thanks to new technology. I think we'll give those posts a swerve and focus only on the new openings.

I was also working on some new manga pieces, and I think those will be a good place to start. Some manga fans have spoken of a feeling of gloom because the major manga titles have stopped, that is to say, they have finished their runs in the West - in truth a lot of them finished their run in Japan years ago. It will be nice to put Monster, and Death Note, and the like behind us and look at some of the newer titles, and some of the odder ones out there. I'm looking forward to it.

Be seeing you.

20th Century Boys Movie Rocks and the Sunday Times is Clueless.

Let me explain, the Sunday Times has, in the last two weeks, published two tiny reviews of 20th Century Boys and both reviews rubbished the movie; proving only that the Sunday Times critics' Damascene conversion to fans of graphic novels, manga, and all things cartoon is just a further example of grandad trying to dance.

To be fair, the Sunday Times is a serial offender with its reviewers declaring themselves fans of "graphic novels" because they watched Persepolis, and creating lists of "must have" graphic novels with no mention of Shaun Tan's Arrival, in the year that it swept all before it. In fact, this week's Sunday Times Culture section must have proved deeply embarrassing to the paper's TV reviewer A.A. Gill, because it featured Tina Fey on the cover and a large article on Fey and her brilliantly funny creation, 30 Rock. It's embarrassing for Gill because he rubbished 30 Rock and heaped praise on the much inferior Mathew Perry vehicle, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip; which had actually already been cancelled when Gill lauded its superiority.

So anyway, I digress, back to comics, sort of, the first Times review of 20th Century Boys was by far the funniest of the two reviews because apparently the reviewer was bewildered by the flashbacks in the movie - honestly, the thing opens at a future date with a man jailed for drawing a cartoon; the movie pleasingly ends back in that time in that cell. The flashbacks back briefly to the release of T.Rex's 20th Century Boy, and then back to the major kernel of the story, Kenji's childhood, are not just not bewildering, but pretty darned straight forward and expertly handled. As for the reviewer's belief that the acting in this adaptation of Urasawa's hugely popular award-winning manga is sometimes "over the top" well that must have floored fans of Japanese cinema. Honestly, where do they get these people?

Okay, for the benefit of people like Cosmo Landsman, the chaps in the poster up top, were once the children in the picture above, and the story actually begins here, and using kinematographic effects, we are miraculously transported back to that time as an illustration of the central character's memory - this is actually a fairly common technique.

The "bewildering" jump forward at the opening of the movie, where a cartoonist has been imprisoned for drawing an innapropriate cartoon, clearly drawing parallels with contemporary matters and hinting at an authoritarian regime, is pleasing cleared up when the movie ends, sometime in the future, in that same prison. So that's so not "bewildering" is it, unless you didn't actually watch the entire movie?

This page, from the manga the movie was based on, and the subsequent pages below, show how the story moves backwards and forwards in time as the plot is revealed over several volumes, and in the case of the movies, over the trilogy.

>

In my opinion, Urasawa's legion of fans will love this movie, and like me they will be astonished at how like the illustrations a lot of the characters are, and how faithful most of the story and sets are to the original story which ran in Shogakukan's Weekly Big Comic Spirits magazine. I can't recommend it highly enough. But I don't think you need to be familiar with the manga to enjoy the movie, as long as you are not as easily bewildered as the Sunday Times reviewer that is, and as long as you like Japanese movies, comic books, sci-fi, mysteries and a rollicking good adventure. I'm pretty sure also, that the non-linear nature of the plot will not cause nearly as much confusion as it apparently did for the critic concerned.



Not that the movie would struggle if the easily bewildered stayed away, and the only people who placed their bums on the seats where those who bought the 20 million copies of the 20th Century Boys manga that have been sold in Japan, and the many people in the West who have read the scanlations, and have gone on to pick up the newly translated manga. Urasawa's fans alone will surely bring the movie, and the subsequent DVDs, a level of financial success few movies attain these days.

I can hardly contain my excitement, the trailer for 20th Century Boys 2 is out, and it's tacked on to the end of the trailer for 20th Century Boys, below. Unlike the Sunday Times reviewers, I'm very much looking forward to the rest of the trilogy - bring it on.

20th Century Boys (part 1 of 3)

Certificate 15
Cast

Toshiaki Karasawa

Etsushi Toyokawa

Takako Tokiwa
Directors

Yukihiko Tsutsumi
Screenwriters

Yasushi Fukuda

Takashi Nagasaki

Naoki Urasawa

Yûsuke Watanabe

A Comic Strip Culture

Let me first apologise for two things, I kept promising to do a blog-piece on these strips long ago, and now that I finally get well again and get round to it, newspapers in the US are dropping strips and some are even dropping comics pages, and secondly, I'm sorry about the scans, but I really wanted to capture something of the scale of the broadsheet-sized comic sections so they lose bits of strips - what can you do?

On the other hand, it looks like a good time to finally get it up here because one of my fellow British cartoonists, the talented Alexander Mathews, has a strip called King Monkey that he is hoping to place with a syndicate in the US, soon, and I'm also sending a strip, that I'm very excited about, to the US in a week or two. Now, even at the best of times the comic strip business is very difficult to break into, never mind during these challenging times, but I think that both Alex and I should at least give it go. The usual cartoonist maxim should apply, "if you don't send it in, it's already rejected".

I'm a huge fan of US strips, and by that I mean strips that the US syndicates distribute because some of my favourite strips are produced in Canada, but there are a good few cartoonists out there who can't say a good word about them. I have to say I think that on the whole, the syndicated strips are underestimated, especially in the US, where people seem to take the things for granted. They should try living here in the UK, in Edinburgh, for instance, a city of 500,000 people, where the local paper, the Edinburgh Evening News, carries two comic strips, Hagar and Garfield, and it shrinks them to about 3/4" x 5" and it really doesn't care how squished and squashed those two strips look. They are an afterthought.

Despite coming from this comic-strip-challenged culture, young Alex and I are willing to take our chances in the spiritual home of comic strips, the US, where a tiny handful of British cartoonists already have their strips syndicated. One of those pioneers is Roger Kettle, one half of Beau Peep and the writer of Andy Capp, who, like me, is amazed that the fantastic collections of strips that the US readers enjoy is regarded by them as too few, or too small, or unvaried. Oh, to be sure, I understand where some of the older strip fans are coming from because I once had a collection of vintage Sunday Funnies that were as big as an old British Topper comic, and as thick as a phone book, but come on, these things are a joy, rich and varied and colourful and a testament to an art-loving culture.

There is a serious point to this, of course, the US is, I think, as is clear from the samples of the newspapers below, much more comic, or comic strip, literate than the UK. The papers I've posted below, from 2004 and 2005, supplied by Mike Lynch, Dan Collins and Jay Nocera, show the sort of daily and weekly diet of comic strips that US beginning cartoonists, and would-be comic strippers, grow up with. Picture it, as the beginning cartoonists in the US are practising their craft the sheer variety of the visual language of the comics, the beat of the language, the form of the jokes, the cleverness of the language, is all there to be soaked up even before they first pick up a pen and dip it in the ink. And what is crystal clear to me, looking at the comic pages below, from the Boston Sunday Globe, the Hartford Courant, the Columbus Dispatch and the New York Daily News, is not just that comic strips are taken much, much, more seriously in the US than they are over here, that's a given, but also that there is a very real respect for the cartoonists and the reader, and a clear attempt to run comic strips that will appeal to a very wide audience.

The following full colour comic sections are about the same size as a Sunday Times broadsheet and as thick, if not thicker, than a British kids comic, with a wide range of strips covering everything from Dilbert to Prince Valiant.

I once asked, on Darrin Bell's old Toontalk forum, why American cartoonists often thought they were not real bona-fide cartoonists unless they had a syndicated strip out there, especially since lauded cartoonists like Chris Ware and Jaime Hernandez and Daniel Clowes were clearly world-renowned cartoonists without working in that oeuvre. Of course it was a rhetorical question, the answer for me was that comic strips are part of the American psyche.

Copyright of the comics pages above rest with their respective publishers, and the various cartoonists and agencies.

So, should we pity poor Alex and poor Rod as they send their creations of to be measured and judged? Well, no, not really, you see the work is done and the syndicates are the top market for main stream comic strips, they are the Super Bowl, the F.A Cup final, the Olympics, they are the ultimate test for a comic strip. How on earth could we resist sending the work to them? It may seem like a cliche, but it is the turning up and taking part that counts and you never know, one of us or both of us might just sneak one by them. Wouldn't that be something?

Once More into the Breach...as it were.

Or at any rate, "once more (slowly) into the breach", as it were. Please bear with me, I'll get up to speed eventually.

This struck me as a good idea for a blogging because it cemented my relationship with a few texts that some misguided people still frown upon, in toffee-nosed literary circles. Not so very long ago, I was feeling really, really, sorry for myself; around my eighth or ninth day on water (not even the bread and water diet of Edmond Dantes) and I really got a great deal of joy from reading a bunch of stuff that I really had no right to expect more joy from, given that I have read and reread the stuff from cover to cover over and over again.

Perhaps it could be best described as comfort-reading, or maybe more precisely as renewing an old friendship - whatever, around the 30th day of my water-fest I had read my Love and Rockets and my American Splendors and my copy of Ghost World so often that I might be forgiven for throwing them away but honestly, I'm looking forward to reading them all again; although I could do without the being ill part.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I could have spent my time reading Brecht, the Norton Anthologies, Shakespeare, Joyce, or even P.G Wodehouse, all of which is right up my street (I'm a pretty pretentious guy), but I found my comfort in literature that pleased both my eyes (especially while the text was blurry) and my brain, and found, even reading these things for the umpteenth time, just as rewarding as the day they were delivered to me. Here's a complete list of my well-beloved titles:


Ghost World, by Daniel Clowes


20th Century Eightball by Daniel Clowes


American Splendor by Harvey Pekar

Hate by Peter Bagge

Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez

These were the titles that I kept returning to, despite having a wide range of possibilities, so to me they gifts that keep on giving. I just found that when I couldn't even be bothered watching a DVD and the text of any number of novels looked more like marching ants than recognisable words I got a lot of comfort from holding, carrying, looking at and reading these books - even the colourful covers cheered me up. These, mainly Fantagraphics titles, were real Chicken soup for the soul to me.

Hey Everyone, thanks.

Hey everyone, thanks for the many good wishes and the gifts and cards; they made a real difference and lifted my mood, which was very dark for the longest time.

I only have one or two more tests to go and so far everything is progressing nicely. My concentration isn't great and my eyesight will need rechecked for new reality goggles, but that's no big deal.

I've hated not being able to work, but what can you do? Not that there is a lot of work out there, there is certainly a lot less than there was last year, already, in the world of gag and strip cartoons. Hopefully, we can put our heads together and figure out some new angles, after all; who's like us?

I'll write to you all individually over the next few weeks.

Hope to be Back Soon

Rod is ill at the moment. He has been quite unwell since 1st January. The doctor has been in and out and is carrying out tests. We will hopefully know what is wrong with him within the next few weeks.

He sends his love and best wishes to you all for 2009 and apologizes for not being around much. He hopes to be back to work soon as possible.


Best Wishes,

Liz (Mrs Rod).

End of the Year Awards.

I have a post or two to finish for the FPI blog, but I'm hoping to make this the last blog post here, on Rod McKie Illustrations and Cartoons, this year. I'm following the lead of our political masters and vanishing on my "staycation" until January the 12th. So, do whatever it is you all like to do over this period and enjoy yourselves. Next year is going to take some tackling, so refuel those batteries.

As I was just discussing the CAT awards with Jonathan I'll start with them.

Jonathan mentioned that anyone can nominate the people they think should win. That is a good point, I think, and looking at the way a bunch of cartoonists lobbied the Sun not to drop its gag cartoons, and stopped the illegal sale of cartoon art by auction in Edinburgh not so long back, I think cartoonists can argue for change and I think Jonathan is right, it is important to bring this point to your attention.

However, I'm not not sure about the Young Cartoonist award because I'm not sure how relevant it is, especially if we are honest about the future of a "young cartoonist", and especially today. Being able to draw one good, funny, cartoon, will not lead to a career in cartooning. If we are to be honest, and that is one of the things I am desperately hoping will come from this discussion, there are hardly any full-time professional cartoonists left in the UK, unless you include the cartoonists who work in book publishing and comic book production, and the CAT awards don't.

Let me just make clear the points I made to Jonathan. As a cartoonist, and one who practises capturing likenesses (not very well) I know very well that caricaturing is a skill.

As a gag cartoonist I sometimes feel life just isn't funny enough for more gag cartoons, and only the editorial cartoonists, or political cartoonists like Nick Newman, should be using the space.

But, if I make those points when I'm trying to convince everyone that British cartooning needs to become more inclusive to survive, and that the narrow focus by the London-based cartoonists on their own little universe is going to see that universe collapse, I won't make my point.

If the Cartoon Arts Trust awards, in the form they are in, is all we are ever going to have in the UK, then obviously one has to be thankful for small mercies, on the other hand, why not try to increase their scope?

My example of Kieran Meehan for comic strip artist is not because I think he is a better cartoonist than Charles (Peattie), in fact I personally prefer Peattie's drawings. But it's an example that I think is valid. Kieran Meehan has achieved, by getting his strip syndicated by Kings Features, where it has survived a name change, something that many British cartoonists over the decades have dreamed of doing. For that reason alone I think he deserves respect. I could just as easily have suggested the Rogers for Andy Capp, which continues to attract new fans in the US.I'd even put forward Roger Kettle for a lifetime achievement award for his writing on Beau Peep, Andy Capp and A Man called Horace, but these awards are, as far as I can make out, avoiding the slightest reference to modern culture.

Anyone who has read this blog will know that this narrow view of cartooning is one I have tried to counter for decades. If you read Moore and Reppion's Albion Comic, you'll know a bit of the story of IPC's burning of the comic art, and if you read this blog in any depth you'll know the whole story; back in the day before the University of Kent opened its doors to a wider range of cartoon art I tried, with the help of Liz Ottaway, to get them to save IPC's decades of comic artwork that was earmarked for incineration. At the time, only "editorial" (yes, now you're getting it) cartoons were accepted into Kent's collection and Liz Ottaway couldn't even talk the place into using a broom closet to house the comic pages - not even those by Stan McMurtry (Grimley Fiendish after Baxendale) and Steve Bell (Gremlins). It worries and disappoints me, in equal measure, that today, in 2008, we have a cartoon awards ceremony that seems to take a similarly narrow view of what is a worthy cartoon.


Anyway, it's out there, and if even one more cartoonist is talking about it and thinking about it, then that's a good thing. AS Tom Spurgeon (a belated Many happy returns Tom; welcome, officially, to middle-age) pointed out on his blog though, it was more a post focusing on British cartooning, and my own awards ceremony is the same:

Great Cartooning Acheivement: Hands down it's a tie between The Beano and Gary Northfield for Derek The Sheep, the first creator owned strip to ever appear in that publication.

Best Comic: Laura Howell's Johnny Bean (The Beano again). The winner of the Best Comic Strip at the 2006 International Manga and Anime Festival, and the first regular female Beano cartoonist, and the cartoonist behind Toxic Comic's Robin Hoodie and DFC's The Mighty M, wins hands down.

Best Cartoonist: I dislike giving this to Wilbur Dawbarn, but there is no escaping it, Wilbur is the cartoonist of the year. I pretend that the flies he draws on his character's trousers in his Private Eye cartoons look like erect penises, but he shrugs it off. I tried to sow the seeds of doubt in his mind, but he keeps on regardless.

Best Graphic Novel: Oliver East's Trains are Mint. Yes, they are.

Best Mini-Comic, or self-published book: I'm giving this to Gerard Whyman for his collection of his cartoons, Oddly Distracted, for two reasons, one is that you don't see enough cartoon collections these days, and the other reason is I think this is a great example of how gag cartoonists can take control of their own destiny. Also, this book is great value and Ger is funny.

Best Comic Artist: Jamie McKelvie for Phonogram: The Singles Club.

Best Graphic Story: Tom Gauld for all manner of things, including his work in Kramer's Ergot #7.

Best Web Comic: This is a tie between John Allison's Scary Go Round, a perfect example of a well-round digital universe and Darryl Cunnigham's Super Sam, presented as a series of, currently, 64 colourful and exotic pages.

Best Illustrator: Danny Allison, who this year won the Flair Illustrator of the Month award for his Nature Magazine cover of April 2008, melting Greenland.

Best Editorial Cartoon: I think Alex Hughes making a haulage truck recognisably the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, is a fantastic example of cartoon art used to make a political point, without being boring to look at. The drawing works as a political cartoon and could even be transformed into a comic or a kiddies book character. It just works as a brilliant artistic idea.

Best Caricaturist: This is better than "best caricature" which sounds like a one-off. I'm tempted to give a double award to Alex Hughes for the Gordon Brown haulage truck, and I was also tempted to suggest the Al Hirschfield-inspired Gary who has shown a lot of flair recently, I think, but instead I'm going to give this award to the rather excitable Jonathan Cusik for his illustration of John Prescott's TV show on the Class system, which encapsulates almost every aspect of the series in one drawing, and for generally being in the same league, almost, as MAD Magazine's Tom Richmond.

Lifetime Achievement Award: I'm happy with Raymond Briggs. He is fantastic, and I still have my Fungus book, and my Fungus stationary set.

Best Cartoon-related Blog: Lew Stringer's Blimey it's another Blog about Comics. A great blog, hours of fun.

Best Pocket Cartoon: Fuck Off!

Cartooning in the 21st Century at Forbidden Planet

I had to condense my thoughts on the Cartoon Art Trust Awards a couple of posts down, but I've widened the debate on the Forbidden Planet blog, and thanks to Joe's editing it kind of makes more sense. I try hard not to let the things veer off into a tangential rant, but it sometimes happens. Not this time, I think, I'm fairly focused on this one because it also relates not just to something I am interested in, but directly to my future.

In the next post on the FPI blog, which is sort of part 2 of the current one, I attempt to offer up some suggestions about new possibilities for cartoonists in the coming, difficult, years.

Let me just remind you not to email me about this, that goes double for you Reston.

Again with the emails! Look, it should be clear to you, without having to resort to close-reading of the text, or to look for unwitting testimony, or to read too closely between the lines, that I am criticising the Awards ceremony, because it has a narrow definition of what a cartoonist is.

A more inclusive cartoon awards ceremony that recognises excellence in web cartooning (maybe Darryl Cunningham whose comic pages on the FPI blog number around 60), in comic book work (Jamie McKelvie, for instance, for Suburban Glamour or Phonogram - who, incidentally, despite a large body of work, would fit the existing "young cartoonist under 30 category"), in syndicated comic strip work (Keiran Meehan for getting his comic strip Pros & Cons syndicated by King Features), in international excellence (perhaps Tom Gauld for his work in numerous collections and in the Harvard Business Review and the New Yorker and the gigantic Kramer's Ergot 7), in graphic novel writing and drawing (Bryan Talbot for Alice in Sunderland), would surely have been appropriate now, more than ever, than simply having a teeny pocket cartoon in a British newspaper.

All these people are cartoonists, and brilliant cartoonists at that. The narrow definition of cartoonists promoted by this award ceremony, looks like a jaded and old fashioned idea that has had its time. What we have then, if we accept the challenge, is an opportunity for the Cartoon Art Trust to broaden its horizons and to embrace a wider range of categories and of cartoonists that will be more representative of cartooning in the 21st century - and at the same time will bring mainstream, web, and indy cartooning together. That, I have to tell you, would be an awards ceremony worth attending (although that voting panel would have to go and be replaced by the cartooning community at large). And I am surprised that the Bloghorn crowd are so against that idea.

The grim truth is that in what seems like no time at all to me, the 2,000 monthly cartooning opportunities that once existed every month when I was a beginning cartoonist have reduced to around 200, and that has been during a period of economic upswing. We are now in recession and heading for a depression. How many of these traditional cartooning markets will survive? I don't know, but there are cartoonists out there who are already making use of non-traditional markets, and creating excellent work, and there is a disconnect between them, and awards like this, which suggests to me that these cartooning awards lack vision.

Cartoonist Nelson Dewey Flips you the Bird.

I think that Pat Byrnes was inspirational here, not in a bad way, but he did encourge Nelson Dewey to come up with the "birdicon"; and here it is.

.l..

From Pat:

I encourage everyone to spread this meme. And note the time and date. Tuesday, December 16, 2008, 4:05 PM CST, Nelson Dewey invented the birdicon. That should be in its Wikipedia entry. What an honor it has been to witness history in the making.

I'm sitting here laughing at the sheer beauty of it. Once again, Nelson, that is so brilliant. I can't wait to use it.


And there you were thinking those cartoonists all look so innocent.

Technical note: you'll need lower case L from the Verdana font to send your greeting.