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.