Spectator Cartoons get worse.

Let me make my position clear on this; I know exactly where I fit into the cartoon firmament. I get paid $800 a cartoon, but often work for less, especially in my home country. I've got work in collections and museums. I have nothing left to prove. I have no need to work for the Spectator, and have nothing to gain from criticising their cartoons - but I'm going to do it anyway.

Mike Heath is the Cartoon Editor of the Spectator, so he ultimately must take the blame for the risible crap they publish, but the cartoonists themselves are actually producing the crap and cashing the cheques - so they aren't blameless. Here's a link to the cartoons: Spectacularly unfunny stuff.

Clearly, there's a problem, or two. Well, they don't pay well - that's a given. But I think there's another problem, and that is the closeness of the Cartoon Editor to the crowd at another direly unfunny publication; Private Eye. The majority of the Eye cartoonists stopped being funny years ago, around about the time most of them hit retirement age, and yet they are nodding to indicate they wish to 'stay on'. And all the same unfunny-cartoonists' names crop up with depressing regularity in the Spectator. The effect of this is similar to the problems the British sit-com experienced when Terry and June was given air-time, namely, that aspiring youngsters mimicked what was already being bought. So not only is the Spectator stuffed with crap old cartoons, but it's also attracting crap new cartoons as the 'beginning' cartoonists out there copy both the look, and the parochial humour of the publication.

Here's the sort of cartoon you won't find in the Spectator, that is until one of their favourite 'cartoonists' produces a variation of it: