Herne Bay Cartoon Festival 2019 launch countdown
July 29, 2019 in Events, General, News
This year’s poster was created for the festival by © Marf.
Sue Austen (Festival Organiser) writes:
The Herne Bay Cartoon Festival has landed for another year. This is the seventh consecutive festival in the lovely Kent seaside town. The theme for this year is Fly Me to the Moon referencing the fiftieth anniversary of the first manned mission to the moon in 1969.
The Fly Me to the Moon exhibition is now open at Beach Creative featuring new work by PCO members including Dave Brown, Martin Rowson, Kathryn Lamb, Andrew Birch, Noel Ford, Tim Harries, Roger Penwill, Royston Robertson, Des Buckley, Kipper Williams, Jeremy Banx, Gerard Whyman, The Surreal McCoy, Rob Murray, Sarah Boyce, Glenn Marshall, Chris Burke, Neil Dishington, Jonesy and others.
Poster cartoon by © Steve (Jonesy) Jones.
Also open now is Book Marks at the Bay Art Gallery in William Street. Book Marks is a PCO exhibition on the theme of literature and books which has come to Herne Bay from Westminster Reference Library as the first small step on a planned tour of the solar system. The show features work by over 30 members of the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation (PCO) including a host of familiar cartoonists from the pages of The Guardian, The Independent, Private Eye and the rest of the British press.
The festival’s third exhibition is One Giant Leap which will be open from Friday 2nd August at The Seaside Museum, 12 William Street, CT6 5NR. This show features work on loan from the British Cartoon Archive held at the University of Kent. The exhibition includes original cartoons and artwork from the time of the moon landing in 1969, other Apollo missions and moon related stories. Artists represented in the show include Giles, Trog, Garland, Jensen, Homer, Emmwood, Langdon, Gary Barker, Rowson and Dave Brown.More than 20 cartoonists and caricaturists will descend on Herne Bay for the weekend of 2nd- 4th August. On Saturday 3rd Zoom Rockman hosts a cartoon workshop at Beach Creative and later the same day Roger Todd will run a puppet caricature workshop there.
On Sunday 4th the weekend culminates with the annual Cartooning Live event on Herne Bay Pier where the visiting artists create giant cartoons, aunt sallies and peep boards. We are promised a balloon Boris will be attacked by seagulls whilst astronaut ‘John’ Glenn (Marshall) will be attempting Herne Bay’s first moon landing on the town’s iconic pier.
For updates on the Herne Bay Cartoon Festival, follow @HBCartoonFest on Twitter or go to Facebook.com/HBCartoonFest.
With thanks to all our sponsors and supporters including Arts Council England, Canterbury City Council, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent and the PCO.
by Glenn Marshall
Why does no one want to be a cartoonist any more? The lack of new blood doesn’t bode well for the industry’s future
July 25, 2020 in Comment, General
Written by Nick Newman for (and courtesy of) The Spectator with bonus cartoon content.
‘Nightmare!’ is how The Spectator’s cartoon editor Michael Heath has been describing cartooning for at least 30 years, but it’s truer now than ever. Eighty years ago, cartoonists were so celebrated that waxworks of Low, Strube and Poy were displayed in Madame Tussauds. Today, all that remains of Low is a pair of waxy hands in Kent University’s British Cartoon Archive. We are a vanishing species.
A © K.J. Lamb cartoon from Cherwell Magazine done during the time Kathryn was still at college.
There is a lack of new blood in the industry that doesn’t bode well for the future. When I was a student, getting published in Punch and Private Eyewas seen as the pinnacle of a career in humour. Many tried —and succeeded — from an early age. K.J. Lamb was selling gags to the Eyewhile still at Oxford. Ken Pyne was published in Punch when just 16 — as was Grizelda in Private Eye. The FT’s Banx was also a Punch stalwart by the time he was 20. That was then. Now we are all middle-aged and there are few youngsters snapping at our heels. The last time six cartoonists met at a Spectator party we had a combined age of over 350. In a recent photo of Eye cartoonists, featuring 45 of the top names, only one was under 30.
Punch cartoon from 1983 by a youthful © Jeremy Banks
Yet there’s every indication that cartoons are as loved by the public as ever. They are tweeted, shared, posted on Instagram; they go viral and get printed out and stuck on fridges. Pocket cartoons, pioneered by Sir Osbert Lancaster in the 1930s, are a particularly British art form and one that is still prized. Editors place topical gags on the front pages of newspapers, a practice rarely seen in France, Germany or America.
So why the dearth of new cartooning talent? The simple answer is that the opportunities have narrowed. Since the death of Punch, the main outlets for freelancers are Private Eye, The Spectator and the Oldie — and competition is fierce. Private Eye receives more than 500 submissions per issue and publishes up to 50. Every newspaper used to have regular pocket cartoonists — now only a handful survive. In straitened times for print media, the cartoons are often the first to go. Many of us lost work when lockdown was announced.
Another problem is financial. Some publications haven’t raised their rates since before the fall of the Berlin Wall, while others pay as little as £50 per cartoon. Compare that with the New Yorker, which is reported to pay between $700 and $1,400 per gag, depending on the artist’s ‘seniority’. One British publisher once asked me: ‘If we pay more, will the jokes be any funnier?’ I wish now I had said yes.
It isn’t just the lack of money that’s deterring new talent. There is also fear of failure. Rejection is a way of life for even seasoned cartoonists and today’s snowflakes can’t cope with it. I recently encouraged a promising young cartoonist to try The Spectator, which he did with immediate success. I still warned him: ‘You will get rejected. Everyone gets rejected.’ After two issues of ‘no thanks’ he has abandoned cartooning.
We veteran cartoonists do try to encourage the next generation, although it’s akin to committing professional suicide. The Cartoon Art Trust’s Young Cartoonist competition — judged by Fleet Street cartoonists — receives 1,000 entries a year. We joke that the objective is to identify the talent and then break their little fingers, but we stupidly don’t, and instead celebrate new stars and extra competition. Former winner Will McPhail is now a New Yorker regular; Rob Murray draws for Private Eye and the Sunday Times; Ella Baron for the TLS. All were in their twenties when they won, which suggests the talent is out there.
© Rob Murray’s first cartoon in Private Eye.
Oliver Preston, chairman of the Cartoon Art Trust, thinks alternative outlets distract comic artists. Graphic novels such as Kingsman, which was turned into a successful Hollywood movie franchise, are a more enticing means of earning aliving. Also, the ability to self-publish online cuts out editors who say, in the words of Heath: ‘You are not funny, Mr So-Called Funnyman.’ Ruby Elliot is a young illustrator better known as ‘rubyetc’ on Instagram, where she has 277,000 followers. Through her website, she sells merchandise, artwork and subscriptions to her cartoons.
Jon Harvey, the creator of Count Binface (who stood against Boris in his Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat in the last election), is the sort of sharp-minded political gagster who in another era would have drawn up his ideas and sold them to publications. Instead, he puts his jokes on Twitter to boost his online profile. It’s quicker, the response is immediate and, as he quips: ‘The editor of my Twitter page is more likely to take it.’ The theory is that getting noticed online may lead to commissions for radio and TV. He describes the internet as a ‘Wild West’ of opportunities for those who know how to self-promote or nurture a following.
For those of us brought up on dead wood who still find magic in newsprint, it may be too late to grasp these opportunities. So we continue to live the ‘nightmare’. How long the nightmare continues remains to be seen.
With many thanks to The Spectator for allowing us to reproduce this piece.
You can see an item featuring Nick on this story from BBC Newsnight (around 37 mins in)
Tags: Banx, British Cartoon Archive, cartoonists, cartoons, Count Binface, Ella Baron, Grizelda, Jeremy Banx, Jon Harvey, K J Lamb, Ken Pyne, Low, Michael Heath, New Yorker, Newsnight, Nick Newman, Oliver Preston, Poy, Private Eye, Punch, Ruby Elliot, Rubyetc, Sir Osbert Lancaster, Strube, Sunday Times, The Cartoon Art Trust, The Oldie, The Spectator, TLS, Will McPhail, Young Cartoonists of the Year No Comments »