The PCO Cartoon Review of the Year 2020
December 28, 2020 in General, Links, News
Cartoon by © Andy Davey.
Glenn Marshall wrote:
Once more my friends it’s time for the PCO Cartoon Review of the Year, featuring work from members of the PCO (speech) bubble. It’s been a difficult year to find humour in, although it would be a nightmare for cartoonists if any year was filled with just love, joy and kittens! I ended last year’s review with “So what fresh horrors will 2020 have in store?” – how little did we know!
As we chase off 2020 (envisioned above by Andy Davey for The Telegraph) one story seems to have dominated this year’s review over all others. Just for fun, see if by the end you can spot which one it is?
Cartoon by © Dean Patterson
To start us off the this cartoon by Dean Patterson sums up the year in one image.
Cartoon by © Andrew Fraser
Some family entertainment by Drew in Private Eye.
Cartoon by © The Surreal McCoy
This cartoon by Ms McCoy was from Lockdown 1.0 but works equally well now for Lockdown 2.5 (and counting)
Cartoon by © Matt Percival
…and from check-in let’s move on to the baggage area with a Percival cartoon reclaimed from The Spectator.
Cartoon by © Nick Newman
Nick Newman in the The Sunday Times on the looooong running Dom Com. In a questionnaire in The Sunday Times Nick recently cited this cartoon as a favourite he’d done this year.
Cartoon by © Glenn Marshall
Some testing times for Cummings back in May.
Cartoon by © Rebecca Hendin
Rebecca Hendin’s very own lockdown guidelines appeared in the New Statesman.
Cartoon by © Jeremy Banx
Masker vs Anti-masker featuring Batman and Superspreader from Banx in the Financial Times. Jeremy was recently voted ‘Pocket Cartoonist of the Year’. You can see a report on the awards by PCO Chair-human Clive Goddard on the PCO YouTube Channel.
Cartoon by © Clive Goddard
…and talking of Clive Goddard.- in other news (was there any other news I hear you ask?) here’s Harry and Meghan doing some extreme social distancing from the family by Clive.
Cartoon by © Steve Bell
Can’t a have a cartoon review of the year without some Donald – hopefully not so much in next year’s! This splendid reworking of the Delacroix painting ‘Liberty Leading the People’ (more like ‘Liability Bleeding the People’) is by Steve Bell in The Guardian. Steve was voted ‘Political Cartoonist of the Year’ in the afore-mentioned awards.
Cartoon by © Andy Davey
…and in The Daily Telegraph Andy Davey poured ‘Scorn’ (other bleaches are available) on Donald Trump.
Cartoon by © Sarah Boyce
The Black Lives Matter movement started after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Here is a creative twist on the phrase from Sarah Boyce published in PE.
Cartoon by © Rupert Besley
INTERLUDE: As a diversion from relentless bad news stories here’s a lovely, soothing cartoon and drawing from Rupert Besley.
Cartoon by © Chris Williams
School days are supposed to be the haPPEiest of our lives! Here’s Dink on the return to school in September.
Cartoon by © Tat Effby
The taking down of public statues also led on from the birth of Black Lives Matter. Later in the year there was a furore about the Mary Wollstonecraft memorial sculpture by artist Maggi Hambling. Tat Effby successfully clashes the two stories with a nude Clive of India.
Cartoon by © Steve Jones
In lack of live Entertainment News: Jonesy reports for Private Eye on the new rules for theatre goers…
Cartoon by © Kipper Williams
…and Kipper Williams took us to the cinema in The Spectator.
Cartoon by © Royston Robertson
Excellent cartoon from our technology correspondent Royston Robertson. I think we’re all suffering from a bit of this, indeed I’m sure I have ‘Long Zoom Fatigue’
Cartoon by © Martin Rowson
Didn’t have to have my arm twisted to use this pretty bullying cartoon by Martin Rowson for Kevin Maguire’s The Mirror column.
Cartoon by © Graeme Bandeira
In sports news Graeme Bandeira puts his hand to a caricature of Maradona for The Yorkshire Post. For some bonus content you can see Graeme’s cartoon that won ‘Political Cartoon of the Year’ in the awards report mentioned earlier,
Cartoon by © James Mellor
In more sports news James Mellor takes to the fairways. Like many I took up indoor grouse shooting.
Cartoon by © Guy Venables
Back to Trump who, at time of going to press, STILL hasn’t lost the election. This by Guy Venables in his regular slot for The Metro.
Cartoon by © Ed Nay
Clever drawing by Nay. Can you see what is yet?
Cartoon by © Steve Bright
A contender for Man(iac) of the Year, the dyed-hair Trumpublican attorney Rudy Giuliani. I loved this caricature by Brighty.
Cartoon by © Pete Dredge
A substantially funny cartoon from Pete Dredge served up in The Spectator.
Cartoon by © Pete Songi
A fabulous homage to Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’ by Pete Songi culled from Martin Rowson’s twittersphere #Draw2020challenge.
Cartoon by © Dave Brown
Talk about Johnson being out of his depth with everything from PPE, Cumming’s eye tests, track and disgrace etc etc etc, You feel Boris just hasn’t got it….well he did get it, but you know what I mean. This from The Independent by Dave Brown really sums up Boris’ year.
Cartoon by © Roger Penwill
Roger Penwill takes to the road for ‘Roadway’ (the magazine from the Road Haulage Association). It’s about the Kent lorry parks post Brexit, but became even more relevant with the closed border before Christmas.
Cartoon by © Wilbur Dawbarn
This BBC balanced offering from Wilbur plucked from The Spectator…
Cartoon by © Zoom Rockmann
…and more Christmas fun. This taking the Santa knee from Zoom Rockman in the Private Eye Christmas special..
Cartoon by © Chris Burke
Let’s end the year with this lovely festive offering from Chris Burke, it’s what we all wanted in our stockings this year.
So a Happy? New Year from all at PCO megacorp.
Now, I wonder what fresh horrors 2021 will have in store?
Cartoon by © Martin Rowson for The Mirror Kevin Maguire column.
by Glenn Marshall
Still Splitting Fog
September 23, 2020 in Comment, General
Pandemic cartoon from Nebelspalter (1918) by Fritz Boscovitz. (The crowd is gathered round a sign saying, Flu – no assembly…’)
Rupert Besley writes:
As a student I had the good fortune several times to work abroad on holiday jobs in the north-east of Switzerland. Happy days. Swiss newspapers then were hard work to get through – great slabs of dense print, well beyond my linguistic skills and I’m pretty sure even those with German as first language found much the same. This was 50 years back and more, but I don’t think much has changed since (or not when I last tried reading a copy of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and collapsed under its weight).
From Nebelspalter 2012: cover page, cartoon by Oliver Ottitsch (to accompany a feature on mis-measurement). The boy on the right is saying, ‘you’ve got that ruler the wrong way round.’
But there was one publication that stood out on the news-stands and that was Nebelspalter, a satirical magazine with an eye-catching cartoon on its cover. The name means Fog-splitter, preferably with a heavy cleaver or axe. (All of which brings to mind Foghorn, the PCO’s own subversive publication for several years.) Inside were fine cartoons, including ones by the likes of Bosc, whose work needed no language skills to be able to enjoy.
Nebelspalter 2012: Mark Zuckerberg caricature by Michael Streuen.
Nebelspalter was founded in 1875, as ‘an illustrated humorous political weekly’, heavily modelled on Punch. Its finest hour was through the 1930s and 40s, when it took on Nazism in Germany and followers in Switzerland. Since then the publication has had its ups and downs. By 1998 its circulation (70,000 in the 1970s) had dropped to 8,000. But a last-minute rescue plan enabled the magazine to continue, appearing more or less monthly. In 2017 it had a print run of 21,000 and according to a market research study had 160,000 readers per issue (all such details taken from the entry on Wikipedia). These days it is into online subscribers. Nebelspalter reckons to be the oldest illustrated humour/satire publication still in circulation.
From Simplicissimus: 1903 caricature by Gulbransson of composer and Bayreuth Festival director Siegfried Wagner.
Another tribute act to Punch was Germany’s Simplicissimus, named after the hero of a raunchy 17th cent novel recounting the tales of one surviving the Thirty Years War. Simplicissimusfirst appeared in 1896 and was published weekly till 1944, suspended for 10 years and then revived, coming out bi-weekly in its last three years to 1967. For its first issue, 480,000 copies were printed – and 10,000 sold. Munich based, the magazine found easy targets for humour in Prussian military types and entrenched class snobberies. There were top names among the contributors – writers like Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Frank Wedekind, Hugo von Hoffmansthal and the illustrators included such stars as George Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz, Ernst Barlach, John Heartfield and Olaf Gulbransson.
Simplicissimus, 1908: characteristically dark but powerful study by Käthe Kollwitz. In 1898 the work of Kollwitz was nominated for a gold medal in Berlin’s Great German Art Exhibition, but was denied it after Kaiser Wilhelm II was said to have opined, ‘I beg you gentlemen, a medal for a woman, that would really be going too far… orders and medals of honour belong on the breasts of worthy men.’
Both magazines owed a bit, too, perhaps to their counterparts in France with its strong tradition of satirical magazines. The German and Swiss publications are generally reckoned to have been always somewhat tamer and more restrained than the no-holds-barred swipes of their French equivalents.
I’ve not got to see a full copy of Nebelspalter for many years and am in no position to give any kind of review. But I’m cheered to see it is still going and long may that continue.
Copyright: illustrations 1-3 reproduced by kind permission of Nebelspalter.ch. The magazine has also most kindly provided the following link to its archive, enabling lovers of fine cartoon and caricature to enjoy its superb collection of work published in past issues from 1875 to 2010. Our thanks.
Tags: caracature, cartoonists, cartoons, Fritz Boscovitz, humour magazines, illustration, Illustrator, Käthe Kollwitz, magazines, Michael Streuen, Nebelspalter, Olaf Gulbransson, Oliver Ottitsch, PCO, Procartoonists, Punch, Rupert Besley, Simplicissimus 2 Comments »