Cartoons

Here they are... The cartoons here are just a selection of political cartoon I produced for the Liverpool Student paper. I produced cartoons on initially A3 sheet, which were scaled down to be printed in the newspaper. I moved to A4 from A3 because the A3 sheets were appearantly more difficult to scan. Producing a cartoon typically involved coming up with a good story line; the hard bit! I tend to favour a 4 cell cartoon with the story progressing in each cell. Next I practiced drawing the various characters I would use. Finally, I would draw the final cartoon in pencil, finally filling in with pen as the last stage.

I was actually fairly pleased with this cartoon which dates from summer 2005. The subject is political and is playing on the Blair/Brown tussle. The setting is a fictional number 10 Downing street, with Mr Blair trying to settle down to sleep.

He's discussing an election result with an unseen companion reading `Good Housekeeping'. The idea is that the reader will assume it is Mrs Blair (or is it Cherie Booth QC?). The `visual punch line' is the last slide revealing Gordon Brown as the bed sharer. The idea being the suggestion that actually they weren't worst enermies (and hopefully not suggesting anything else, as we don't want libel action :-)...)

In the context of politics of the time the joke was that the two behind the scenes were best friends and not the enermies the press were portraying. Of course at the time of writing Tony is in the process of handing over the premiership to Gordon.

A play on events surrounding Euan Blair moving to Bristol to start university, the university strike, the 45 minute WMD claim and public transport thrown in for good measure.

The first cell is Euan telling his dad (Mr Blair) that there's a university strike. In the second cell for some reason Tony is wanting to visit Euan rather quickly; maybe he wants to do a parental check on his student son! Cherie is claiming that they can get to Bristol in 45 minutes; which is of course the same amount of time mentioned in the dossier on Saddam Hussein's WMD's.

Euan refers to missiles and 45 minutes in the second half of the cell.

Next John Prescot and Mrs Blair are thrown in for good measure. John rubbishs the 45 minute claim, saying public transport isn't that good. Cherie's response is that they can do London-Bristol in 45 minutes because Tony has a Harley-Davidson motorbike to statisfy his midlife crisis. The final slide is John and Tony on the Harley heading for Bristol. John is again doubting Tony's claim and the bike has, well, a little less power than John's usual Jag.

The cartoon has to be seen in the context of the build up to the Iraq war (which won't be debated here..)

The idea behind this cartoon is that the BBC has misplaced their election presenter John Snow. The two middle slides depict the search for him inside the BBC TV center. He is found with the Daleks (Dr Who bad guys). The final slide depicts John Snow on the election trail, with politicans sounding like dialects. I feel the transition to the last slide doesn't quite work and the last slide isn't really explained well.