The Foghorn - No. 38 by Professional Cartoonists' Organisation

FOGHORN

The best of British cartooning talent

Issue 38

NEWS

FOGHORN Issue 38

Published in Great Britain by the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation (FECO UK)

PCO Patrons Libby Purves Andrew Marr Bill Tidy Foghorn Editor Bill Stott tel: +44 (0) 160 646002 email: billstott@lineone.net Foghorn Sub-Editor Roger Penwill tel: +44 (0) 1584 711854 email: roger@penwill.com Foghorn Layout/Design Tim Harries tel: + 44 (0) 1633 780293 email: foghorn@procartoonists.org PCO Press Ofﬁce email: media@procartoonists.org Web info PCO (FECO UK) website: http://www.procartoonists.org BLOGHORN http://thebloghorn.org/

What is Foghorn? British cartoon art has a great, ignoble history and currently boasts a huge pool of talent. It deserves a higher media presence than it currently enjoys. Our aim is to make sure it gets it. We want to promote cartoon art domestically and internationally by encouraging high standards of artwork and service, looking after the interests of cartoonists and promoting their work in all kinds of media.

FOGHORN The magazine of the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation (FECO UK)

How Foghorn has evolved! From its honourable roots as a thoughtful recorder of the erm, thoughtful side of cartooning, its grown into an utterly irresponsible, thoroughly silly magazine specializing in funny gags and disrespectful articles. Its not THAT inappropriate though – at this auspicious time. Far from always being the serious seeker of scientiﬁc truth, Mr Darwin was in fact, a barrel of laughs – a constant source of witty one-liners about ﬁnches’

beaks, and always on hand in the Beagle’s mess with his ukulele and a couple of verses of “There was an Iguana from Bolton…” Read on, he gets top billing in here. Bill Stott, Foghorn Editor

The Appliance of Science

Shrewsbury gears up for another cartoon invasion. Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival 2009 is on 24th - 26th April. As Shrewsbury celebrates the 200th anniversary of the natural scientist, Charles Darwin, its most famous son, the theme of this year’s Festival is Science (as ably demonstrated on the right by Festival mascot, Barry the Shrew.) Since 2003 the town has hosted this international event which attracts around 40 fulltime, professional cartoonists and caricaturists from the UK and abroad. The Festival offers unique opportunities to see artists at work; 20 of them on huge boards in The Square during the weekend, others drawing caricatures and some running cartoon workshops for all ages. For more details, go to the centre pages.

Copyright All the images in this magazine are the intellectual property and copyright of their individual creators and must not be copied or reproduced, in any format, without their consent. Front Cover: Adrian Teal Back Cover: Rupert Besley Foghorn (Online) ISSN 1759-6440

“One of the perks of working here is that you don’t have to go outside for a smoke” 2 THE FOGHORN

WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG

FEATURE CHRIS MADDEN

Monkey Business Chris Madden gives credit where it’s due.

It’s hard to miss Darwin’s presence this year, 2009, what with it being the bicentennary of his birth and 150 years since the publication of On The Origin Of Species. You could, however, be forgiven for missing the presence of a gentleman by the name of Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace conceived of the theory of evolution by natural selection totally independently of Darwin. Yet he hardly ever gets any of the credit for the theory. It’s true that Darwin came up with the idea ﬁrst, but he then sat on it for many years fearing the consequences of putting it out into the world. It was only when Wallace wrote to Darwin explaining his own ideas on the subject that Darwin realised that he’d better get into print soon. Don’t get the idea that Darwin rushed into print with On The Origin Of Species in order to claim the fame. Darwin was a very decent man by all accounts, and the ﬁrst public presentation of the theory of evolution by natural selection was actually a joint effort by Darwin and Wallace together. They produced a joint paper titled ‘On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection’, which they presented to the Linnean Society in London in 1858. Strangely, despite the bombshells in the paper, its presentation to the society went almost unnoticed, even within the society. Shame on them! WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG

Darwin published On The Origin Of Species a year later and this time its implications were noted. The rest is history. Now it’s time for me to go a little iconoclastic. The fact that Wallace, himself a respected scientist, came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection independently of Darwin means that even if Darwin hadn’t come up with the theory it would nevertheless still have been with us today - thanks to Wallace. I’d actually go further than that, and say that even if Wallace

hadn’t come up with the idea either the theory would still be with us, as someone else would have devised it very soon. The early to mid nineteenth century seems to have been the time when things were just right for the theory to be conceived of. It was in the air. It’s the same with many theories, inventions, discoveries and other products of human endeavour. There may be only a matter of weeks between one person coming up with an idea (and thus becoming immortalised as the idea’s originator) and someone else coming up with it (and thus being forgotten forever). Due to this tendency of ideas to be ‘in the air’ I’m not actually very keen on attributing whole theories, discoveries or inventions to individual people, geniuses though they may be. On top of this, I’ve now lost count of the number of times that I’ve discovered that a particular idea that’s always been attributed to a particular person was thought up years (or even centuries) earlier by someone else, but that that person either couldn’t prove it or publicise it (or wasn’t such an effective selfpublicist). (Note: Darwin definitely didn’t fall into the self-publicist category, being a man of great humility.) I suppose we like to attribute ideas to specific individuals because it helps us to humanise history, but that doesn’t stop it being a slightly skewed way to look at things, and it’s definitely unfair to all of those ‘almost’ people who were a week late with their ideas. THE FOGHORN 3

BLOGHORN

Public Eye, Private Eye

A new exhibition features the work of Barry Fantoni. Barry Fantoni is well known as a cartoonist for The Times and Private Eye. He also pens for Private Eye the notorious obituary-style poems under the name ‘E. J. Thribb, 17 ½ ’ and is the man behind the Heir of Sorrows series by ‘Sylvie Krin’ in the same magazine. However, his private life as an artist will be revealed for the ﬁrst time in the exhibition ‘Public Eye, Private Eye’ at Thomas Williams Fine Art, in Old Bond Street, from 22 April 2009. Fantoni (b. London, 1940) began his career at Camberwell College of Arts & Crafts (1954-

58), from which he was expelled ‘for setting fire to a chair in the common room, being sick in the lavatory, [and] going after the birds’. He nevertheless returned to Camberwell and continued to work as an artist for a further twenty-five years, making a major contribution to the development of Pop Art and teaching, amongst others, Sex Pistols manager, Malcolm McLaren and the group’s graphic designer, Jamie Reid at Croydon College of Art, where fellow teachers included Bridget Riley and Howard Hodgkin. It is hard to find any area in the transforming

decade of the 1960s that Fantoni didn’t make his own. His career at Private Eye began in 1963 and he remains a member of the editorial staff to this day. He was the front-page cartoonist for The Times from 1983-1990, a regular illustrator for The Radio Times and The Listener, art critic to The Times and a music reviewer for Punch. Barry Fantoni: Public Eye, Private Eye is on at Thomas Williams Fine Art, 22 Old Bond Street, London W1S 4PY 22 April – 22 May 2009.

Patron stands up Bloghorn is delighted to report that one of our patrons made her debut performance in a tricky art form recently. Times columnist and BBC Radio Four presenter Libby Purves took on the art of stand-up comedy on behalf of Comic Relief. We know she was nervous about doing this, but we also know her to be a woman with a highly developed sense for the ridiculous. Why else would she choose to associate herself with cartoonists? Mentored by Perrier award-winning comedian Milton Jones, Libby took to the stage for ‘Stand up with the Stars’ and entertained the crowd with tales of voiceover tedium (“three hours in a cellar in Soho, repeating the same phrase over and over”) and the evolutionary process to television presenter. To see Stand up with the Stars, go to the Radio 4 website at : www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/

Artist of the Month for March 2009 is The Surreal McCoy, whose cartoons have appeared in The Independent, The London Evening Standard, The London Jewish News, The Fortean Times and The Oldie magazines among others. The Surreal McCoy also held the post of Cartoonist-In-Residence on Sandi Toksvig’s daily show for LBC radio, drawing live on air and publishing a daily cartoon on the show’s website. Surreal has also provided cartoons and illustrations for Sandi’s latest book, Girls Are Best, which is published by Random House. McCoy publishes daily cartoons and also makes book illustrations and animation. Bloghorn asked Surreal the usual searching question: What made you become a cartoonist? As there’s no history of madness in the family I can only assume it must have been drunken musicians laughing at my incoherent doodling on the tour bus. Since then its been a gradual but digniﬁed slide down to where I am now.

4 THE FOGHORN

WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG

BLOGHORN

The self-analysed cartoonist

Random acts of humour

Caricaturist Adrian Teal writes about the paralysis of analysis.

A PhD student phoned me yesterday, wanting to pick my brains. She’s doing research into politicians and how political cartoons are perceived, and emailed me a list of searching questions which she’ll be putting to me in a telephone interview in a day or so. I’m happy to help, though she tells me she has already spoken to Steve Bell and Martin Rowson, so I’m not sure I’ll have anything more insightful and enlightening to offer than these two giants of the Comment page. And so to confession time … The problem is that I tend not to think too deeply about what I do – at least, not that often. Analysing the cartoonist is like taking a butterﬂy apart to see how it works. I don’t draw because I think I can change the world, or to destabilize governments, though it is highly rewarding to have a pop at a venal politico now and again. I draw because I have to. At 34, I can’t see myself doing anything else. It is as much a part of my life as shaving, or yawning. The actual process can be agonising, although the labour pains are usually forgotten when the artwork turns out well. Sure, I like to be praised when I do a good job, but if I’m honest, I don’t even enjoy cartooning 100 per cent of the time. I suspect most cartoonists are the same. Correct me if I’m wrong.

The choicest ‘Science’ themed limericks taken from the procartoonists.org forum... An elderly bofﬁn once said We’re all chimpanzees, so God’s dead. It angered the Church, Which was knocked off its perch, And now we spend Sundays in bed. Royston Robertson. There was an old fellow called Darwin Whose arguments prove quite alarmin’, ‘Cos he states we’re descended From apes, but amended, Well, is that evolved or self-harmin’? Nathan Ariss.

WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG

“It’s my theory of probability” THE FOGHORN 5

FEATURE TIM HARRIES

It’s all Rolf’s fault He blinded me with science, sings Tim Harries.

Hands up if you owned a Stylophone. According to my extensive research (I looked it up on Wikipedia) three million of these things have been sold, so chances are at least somebody reading this was fortunate enough to have been given one as a Christmas or Birthday present, no doubt to the immediate regret of everyone else in the room. For the rest of you who are wondering what I’m blathering on about, a little explanation is perhaps needed. Having decided to write something on Music and Science, I contemplated some of the weightier matters - ‘musical pitch cognition in non-tonal contexts’, or perhaps ‘interfaces for computational approaches to music composition and sequencing’ but decided that life’s too short, so I’d write about that strange musical device Rolf Harris used to pimp on the telly. I’m nothing if not shallow. Back to my point... The Stylophone is truly a work of genius - a magical melding of Electronics and Music! Invented in 1967 by Brian Jarvis (I was also invented in 1967, my mother assures me Mr Jarvis was not involved) the Stylophone is a ‘miniature stylus operated synthesizer’ that sounds remarkably like a slightly angry bee. If your sole requirement in the sphere of music is to sound like a slightly angry bee, then this is indeed the instrument for you. If, however, you require anything that

6 THE FOGHORN

sounds remotely pleasing to the ear, you probably need to look elsewhere. Of course, three million sales indicates that angry bees were very much in vogue at the time. I suppose you can’t blame parents for buying their kids a Stylophone - Rolf was very convincing in those ads. How I looked forward to ‘playing those rapid glissandos in seconds without ever having touched a musical instrument before’. Begone years of study and practice! How I’d laugh in the face of scales. Hah. And the sounds! Such magical and varied sounds! The basic organ tone (angry bee) could, with the flick of a switch, become vibrato (angry wobbly bee). If you were particularly flush, a ‘Treble’ model was also available, producing the same sounds an octave above (angry bee kicked in goolies). Rolf painted a magical musical picture - Christmas Eve, a roaring log fire with everyone crowded round the family Stylophone as Tiny Tim belts out Silent Night (complete with glissandos and full vibrato). To top it all off, David Bowie used it on Space Oddity. I HAD to get one! I didn’t get one. I had to make do with borrowing my older brother’s. He’d saved up enough money to get the standard model and was

knocking out faultless versions of the hits of the day (Queen, Sparks) while I was content to simply play ‘three blind mice’ until the mice probably wished they were deaf as well. My memories of what happened to our Stylophone are vague. I’ve got a feeling it was replaced by a state of the art Casio VL1 mini keyboard (complete with built in calculator - no I’m not making this up) but I can’t remember the Stylophone actually getting chucked out. There were three million of these things made - where did they go? Lofts? Landﬁll? Recycled to live a long and fruitful life as Sinclair C5’s? Who knows... However, one amazing fact is that if you laid out three million Stylophone’s end to end, you’d have wasted a lot of time. So what of the Stylophone’s future? Well, rather than languishing in the ‘where are they now?’ ﬁle, its cult status grew to the point where production restarted in 2007 with a new generation discovering the dubious pleasures of this strange instrument. You can play along with your MP3s, download it to your iPhone and do a host of equally new and exciting things. It still sounds like a slightly angry bee though.

WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG

FEATURE SHREWSBURY

Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival 2009 is on 24th - 26th April. As Shrewsbury celebrates the 200th anniversary of the natural scientist, Charles Darwin, its most famous son, the theme of this year’s Festival is Science. Highlights of the 2009 Festival include exhibitions of work by political cartoonist Steve Bell and eminent Czech cartoonist Miroslav Bartak. We are also thrilled to be showing an exhibition of cartoons about science from the year of Darwin’s birth, 1809 to the present day. The British Cartoon Archive, the Cartoon Museum and the British Museum have lent work for ‘Science Friction’ and the selection has been made by Festival patron Professor Colin Pillinger. Cartoons by Kate Charlesworth, cartoonist for The New Scientist, will also be exhibited and a big hit of the Festival is always the themed selling exhibition of new work, originals and prints by Festival cartoonists - ‘Bofﬁnation’ sees cartoon artists from all over the UK and beyond interpreting the theme of the Science of Nature with their usual respect and reverence.

Selected Festival Highlights: Friday 24th and Saturday 25th April, 11am – 4pm, in the Town Square. Cartoonists work on giant 8ft x 6ft drawing boards to create art on this year’s festival theme of Science. Who Do You Think You Are? The opportunity to acquire a brand new body in a non-violent version of the village stocks. In “reverse caricaturing” the artist draws the subject’s body life-size on a giant canvas below their head. Order the body you aspire to, or put yourself at the mercy of the artist! Bring your cameras. WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG

Saturday 25th April, 11am – 4pm in the Town Square. Free cartoon caricatures made in the Town Square. Friday 24th and Saturday 25th April, 11am – 4pm - Darwin Shopping Centre, lower level. Humurals are instant-on-the -spot drawings by the festival cartoonists which build a wall of cartoons. Sunday 26th April at 10am – 11.30am Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery. Meet the Cartoonists: a relaxed morning and chance to meet the Festival cartoonists informally and enjoy the exhibition in the Gallery. THE FOGHORN 7

FEATURE SHREWSBURY

“Just wait until Mr. Darwin see this...”

Science Friction, 23rd April – 31st May, Shrewsbury Museum and Gallery - 200 years of poking fun at science and scientists. Cartoons from the British Cartoon Archive, British Museum and Cartoon Museum alongside 21st century work, selected by Professor Colin Pillinger Open Daily 10am – 5pm (4pm Sundays) ‘Life, the Universe and (Almost) Everything’ 23rd April to 31st May at Cath Tate Cards, Hills Lane – cartoons from the regular strip in New Scientist by Kate Charlesworth whose books include ‘Exotic Species – a Field Guide to British Gays’and whose cartoons have also appeared in The Guardian and The Independent. Open Mon – Sat 10am – 5pm and Sunday 26th April 10am – 4pm

“That new species we just discovered it’s facing extinction.”

“It’s not as if that’s all I do: I write poetry, I’m very much involved in charity work... why single out that one thing?” 8 THE FOGHORN

WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG

FEATURE SHREWSBURY

“Canine Research Laboratories strenuously deny allegations of cruelty to our experimental subjects. All our subjects are as happy as a dog with two tails.”

“They’re responding well to the chlorophyll supplements...” Bofﬁnation, 13th April – 11th May at Bear Steps Gallery – Festival cartoonists treat the great themes of 2009 - science, nature and the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin in their usual respectful way. Selling exhibition of originals and prints including lots of new work by artists from all over the UK and beyond. Open daily 10am – 4pm Steve Bell, 13th April – 11th May, at Bear Steps Gallery.

“Just a theory of course...” WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG

Miroslav Bartak – 13th April – 6th June, Theatre Severn, Chapel Bar. THE FOGHORN 9

FEATURE GUIDE TO EVOLUTION

“Origination of animals and plants from earlier forms’’ is how the Oxford English Dictionary deﬁnes it. Wow! Stuff turning into other stuff ! Got to see that! Well you can’t OK? It all happens really, really slowly. Not like mummy and Daddy loving each other and babies being born etc. Evolution was invented by a chap called Charles Darwin who had huge eyebrows and liked sticking pins through beetles He lived ages ago when that sort of thing was allowed. Darwin also collected worms. Nowadays, he would be offered counselling. As a result, Darwin noticed that unlike beetles, worms did not have legs. Some experts claim that Darwin had noticed the same difference between worms and humans, but sticking pins through humans was illegal even then, and Darwin only had short pins anyway. So on 27th December 1831, having got Christmas out of the way and picked all the glitter out of his eyebrows, Darwin went off with a bunch of sailors on a ship called The Beagle to the Galapagos Islands to ﬁnd out if the curls at the front of certain tortoises shells allowed tortoises on some islands to eat

stuff which grew higher up trees than on other islands. OK so far? Whilst he was there, Darwin discovered loads of other things like ocean going lizards [known these days as “bankers”], and that whilst his very own eyebrows looked like Red Admiral caterpillars, they were in fact just eyebrows, so he stopped sticking pins in them and realized that way back in his family history, somebody must have mated with a lobster. On his return, he kept that bit secret, because people back then were very sniffy about interfering

with crustaceans. Darwin is remembered these days mostly as the chap who said we are descended from apes. This caused a great deal of confusion and indignation, particularly from people who looked like apes, or had blue bottoms*. There is no record of what the apes thought. *The number of blue-bottomed humans alive in the mid 19th century has never been accurately established. Victorians were sniffy about that too.

Artist of the Month for February 2009 was Neil Dishington – he signs his work as Dish. He’s been widely published in Private Eye, The Spectator, Punch, The Daily Express, The Guardian, The Oldie and in many trade and professional publications including Financial Advisor, Medican Publishing, Save and Prosper and Scottish Banker. He specialises in oneline jokes and in “interpreting” written articles. Bloghorn asked him how he started out as a cartoonist: Well, I was always one of those children who drew “cartoons” on the back of my maths book rather than listening to the teacher explaining the Pythagoras Theorem, so I guess that was the start. After five years at Art College painting pictures that were going to change the world, I took up teaching in order to pay the rent. I met a certain David McKee, he of Mr.Benn and Elmer the Elephant fame. We shared a flat and I discovered he had started cartooning. He was a big influence on me. Then I got married and within months my wife was expecting, so in order to boost funds I sent some cartoons to The Daily Mirror and sold one for £5 … never looked back after that!

10 THE FOGHORN

WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG

LETTERS TO THE ED

Random acts of humour

Letters to the Editor Snail Mail: The Editor, Foghorn Magazine, 7 Birch Grove, Lostock Green, Northwich. CW9 7SS E-mail: billstott@lineone.net

No laughing matter

Dear Editor, Here at the Arts Council Archive we have big boxes full of some quite good traditional drawings, many portraying humans. Many of these humans have bubble-like things coming out of their mouths, with words inside the bubbles. Others have words underneath. Some have no words at all. Our experts are at a loss as to exactly what these drawings are. Gregor Plimp, the celebrated curved linear expressive critic suggests that they are “instantaneous momenti mori of a learned experience.” The caretaker says they are cartoons and can often be found laughing out loud at these puzzling artefacts. He says they are funny. What is Funny? Any help you may be able to offer on this matter would be greatly appreciated. Yours sincerely, Sasha Ditmar-Flange Curator, Stuff We Don’t Get The Arts Council

Missing beverage

Dear Editor, I appear to have mislaid my

cup of tea. This piece of crockery has some sentimental value but all I have to show for it is a pair of brown rings on some publication. As this publication is yours, can you shed some light? Yours,

Margo (nee Margot)

A right Charlie

Dear Foghorn, My great - great - great Aunt Alice Figgis nee Spleenblast went to school with Charles Darwin and recalls in her diary that he, “is a mischevious boy, so full of fun, despite his huge eyebrows which even in these hirsute times are unusual in a nine year old. He seldom does tolerate the plaits his loving mother does work them into, and is oft seen to trip and cause himself to fall.. Today he was beaten soundly by the headmaster, the Rev Buttress for shouting, “You’re all monkeys!” at the girls during poker work. Little did they guess how right he was. Yours truly, Edward Figgis [retd]

The Gallery

WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG

THE FOGHORN 11

CURMUDGEON

Gardeners World They’re at it as I type, my organised, diligent, patient and calm neighbours, safe in the knowledge that all their grubbing about will pay glorious dividends. It’s minus ﬁve outside and yet there they are, adjusting the frost nets on their biggus orangwossnamiums. You only have to peep into their garage [possible by standing on the sideboard] to know that their garden’s going to look better than yours come spring; that no greedy little tribe of invertebrates is going to scoff THEIR Flame of the Forest leaves, and THEIR lawn’s going to be ALL grass, not 70% moss and bald bits. The garage is pristine. A hook for everything, and everything on a hook. Shelves with labels and correspondingly correct things above the labels. If a label says “Edg-

ing Shears”, then below it are edging shears – where they should be – on their designated hook and not underneath the pile of soggy cardboard you dumped in YOUR garage after the disastrous IKEA ﬂat-pack bedroom suite episode. Yes, I know... creepy, but true nonetheless. It gets worse. Their gardening is Scientiﬁc! Not for them the vagueness of buying a bag of mouldy brown stuff to bung the puny green things you bought at the B&Q sale in, or a simple peasant’s faith that a big jug of hot water will persuade the ants to clear off. Oh dear me, no. “I see the winterinium panzonias are exhibiting signs of bladderblight – we’d better spray them with a solution of nanosezium. Now let me see, where’s the nanosezium spray? Ah! There it is, on the nanosezium hook.” You get the drift. And it’s only jealousy – not of their garden in spring, which is, let’s face it, all a bit formal and twin-settish – but of their dogged, organized patience, and, I suppose, of their long-suffering silence about my front garden which is the wellspring of every dandelion for miles around. Not once have they even

casually asked, “So when are you going to do something about this bloody war-zone?” Nevertheless, I do love those rare occasions when they’re out – down the Garden Cantre buying another 50 gallon drum of Aphideath – and the hefty tabby from No.11 takes a languid dump in their anemones.