Got a new Prospect in the post today

I did some real slap-happy painting with this cartoon for the January 2007 issue of Prospect (Good Heavens, the new year jobs have begun already). I've done a bunch of art-related cartoons over the years, but not too many Magritte's, which is odd because he strikes me as the most cartoony of artists, well, outside the Lichtenstein, Warhol, Blake pop art circuit. I mean, c'mon, that's a skyful of Herge's Thomson Twins, no? Or are the Thomson Twins really an homage to Magritte?

Prospect came today.

My contributors copy of Prospect came today, and I've got it on ice. I look through magazines very quickly at the cartoons, then at the snippets and headlines and then at the letters page and then I put it away until the evening when I will read it from cover-to-cover. I've always done this, grazed first and then put the material away until later. This applies to comics, books, novels, comic books, cartoon collections, even the ones I have cartoon in. The illustrator/writer, Eddie Campbell, has spoken of almost entering a different space and time for reading comic books but with me I think it's a case of delayed gratification. If I delay the full act of reading as long as I can, I can always look forward to reading the thing. I have to delay it this way because the moment I've turned the last page it's as if all the joy is sucked out of me. I visibly deflate and almost go into a state of depression, unless I have more things to read, that is.

I've looked at all the cartoons and I found one or two very funny. I can't laugh at mine (above), because it's mine and the joy went out of it when I finished it. I enjoyed the cartoons by my friends and colleagues Mike Lynch and Srini Bhukya and one that I'm sure is by one of our old friends whom we haven't seen a lot of recently, Ralph Hagen, it's about lawyers discovering America. Very funny gag.