The Surreal McCoy reports on the recent St Just Cartoon Festival

Nathan Ariss salutes the Spotlights on the Brits exhibition, and an Olympics cartoon from the show by © Roger Penwill @ Procartoonists.org
Entente cordiale. Sounds like something you find on the shelf alongside the bottles of elderflower and blackcurrant flavours right? Wrong.
Actually, the final weekend of the St Just Cartoon Festival, near Limoges in France, was full of such friendly understanding, with 100-plus cartoonists and caricaturists mingling with each other and the general public with great bonhomie.
I was attending as the European liaison officer for Procartoonists.org, along with chairman Nathan Ariss, to represent UK cartoonists, most of them members of our organisation, whose work was being exhibited as Spotlights on the Brits.
The St Just committee had asked for cartoons on the themes of the Queen’s Jubilee and the London Olympics. Our members duly responded with a wide variety of caricatures and cartoons that were prominently displayed in the purpose-built exhibition hall.
Billeted with local familes for the weekend, we were treated with great hospitality. Food and drink was plentiful, long tables were the order of the day. There was much to see on the walls, from the Cartooning For Peace display on elections around the world to the extraordinary rat paintings.

The cartoonist Manu draws for the crowds at St Just @ Procartoonists.org
Cartoonists set up shop with their books and comics for sale on the big round tables. Visitors were caricatured and cartooned, business cards exchanged, contacts made.
The American editorial cartoonists Daryl Cagle (Cagle Post Syndication) and Eric Allie gave a presentation on the state of political cartooning in the US.
On the Saturday afternoon, a brown carpet was rolled out and more mystifying visitor arrived. The area is famous for its Limousin cows so the festival was being honoured with a visit from one of them. It was not, as we had initially thought, the French penchant for a Surrealist installation.

The St Just cow. Not a Surrealist installation @ Procartoonists.org
The cow also doubled up as a prize for cartooning achievement – this year it went to the French cartoonist Aurel. (Apparently it’s the same cow every year, which would explain why she was completely unfazed by the paparazzi’s flash bulbs.)
Sunday morning saw a large assembly of cartoonists crammed into the local priest’s drawing room for the traditional drinks party he hosts each year. We all spilled out into the courtyard in front of the 12th century church in a pastis-induced blur of congeniality before boarding the special cartoonists’ carriage of the Paris train.
A little knowledge of French can get you a long way, mais oui!
by Blog Team
Free will and cartooning
October 30, 2012 in Comment, General
Free will and cartooning: is this a no-brainer? Or will I realise hitherto unseen and earth-shattering truths whilst typing? A eureka moment like finally figuring out what the symbol on your car’s dashboard resembling a tap-dancing flukeworm represents.
In some countries, drawing cartoons, usually political ones, which laud the state and lampoon the running dogs of whatever the state doesn’t much like (this will inevitably involve Obama’s ears) is a pretty safe bet.
Veer towards graphic criticism of the home side though, and you’re in deep doo-doo. Persist in veering and big blokes appear in the night and break your hands. No free will there then.
Cartoon © Bill Stott @ Procartoonists.org
And the hand-breakers don’t just practice their painful ways within the borders of their own country either. They internationalise their state’s repression by blowing you up in the comfort of your own home (given half a chance) thousands of miles away because you disrespected their religion, which IS their state. This is a fairly effective way of severely curtailing the free will of say, a cartoonist in Berkhamstead who comes up with a goodie involving Mohammed and brainwashed bombers.
Of course, we in the developed, civilised world, when not busy invading places a long way away, of which we know little, or selling them arms so that the pro-USA side wins, luxuriate in free will – cartooning and otherwise.
It tends to be the political cartoonists who come to mind if we think about free will, and they do a great job, pushing it to the wire in some eyes, especially if those eyes belong to somebody with broken hands in Longwayawayistan.
Thing is, ours is an old country. Our government rolls with the blows, safe in the knowledge that having the doughty Steve Bell draw you as a shiny condom probably won’t force a general election. And yet that resilience, confidence and apparent belief in the freedom of the press – excepting naughty phone-hacking types – is probably not underpinned by a simple, ingrained sense of fair play.
No, it is maintained by a secret service – a very necessary part of our free world, we are told (often by the secret service), who spook about the place causing things to happen, like one of their own turning up inexplicably dead in a gym bag and now conveniently forgotten by the free press. I don’t recall seeing too many cartoons about that.
Tags: Ali Ferzat, Aseem Trivedi, Bill Stott, free will, political cartooning 4 Comments »