The Professional Cartoonists Organisation

The future - slow cartooning?

nospam@example.com (Andy Davey) — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 08:07:02 +0100

An article in “Prospect” magazine recently by Susan Greenberg (here) highlighted a phenomenon among marketers and brand consultants which is called, with the apocalyptic grandiloquence you would expect from that band of cappuccino cowboys “the end of the middle”. This refers to the abundance of cheap, reasonably functional goods and services at the bottom end of the market, courtesy of global capitalism, causing the loss of mid-range market for slightly better products sold at a premium. Everyone simply buys cheap and discards. This applies to furniture just as it does to mobile phone contracts. Punters are only prepared to pay more for a product or service if it provides real luxury or has some special personalised value.

Greenberg goes on to ask whether this new “model” could also apply to print journalism and uses the term “slow journalism” to describe the luxury end of the journalism market. This is an analogy of the “slow food” movement, which is all about the local, sustainable production of food in a healthy environment, in contrast to the unhealthy, unsustainable fast-food world which ultimately puts farmers out of business. Slow journalism, similarly, would represent a more reflective relationship with information; in other words; “comment and analysis” rather than a constant scrabble for up-to-the-minute “news”.

To use American printed news and comment media as an example, this would be a world of sublime, slow journalism [“The New Yorker”, “Vanity Fair”] and ridiculous fast-food bilge [“The National Enquirer”] but nothing in between, the middle ground having been lost to the internet and TV.

But that's enough crying over the wordsmiths. What about the picture people? This end-of-the-middle phenomenon is already a reality in the world of photography. Could it also form the future of the cartoon markets?

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The Joy of photo-montage

nospam@example.com (Andy Davey) — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 14:29:20 +0100

This may seem like an attack of pique or bitterness…but no. Strange coincidence…possibly. I had just been ranting to the cat about an illustration I’d seen in the previous week’s New Statesman. The cat disagreed, but what does he bloody know? The illustration depicted Christopher Hitchens, ironically, as the Buddha [here]. Rather than a cartoon illustration, the picture editor had chosen a photo-montage; an act which had sent me a-grumbling. Later that day, I was informed that my only regular newspaper cartoon slot (a profile caricature in The Sunday Telegraph) was to be replaced by a photograph from now on. Sorry old chap, and all that, but they’re a bit cheaper. I couldn’t be angry – the Buddha had foretold it, after all. Acceptance; that was the clear message.

The offending photo-montage accompanied a review of the Old Curmudgeon’s latest book – a tirade against faith. As far as montages go, it wasn’t a bad one – the Staggers is now full of similar but inferior composites; mostly constructions of Blair, Bush and Brown in humorous poses, which, in the past, would have been drawn by a cartoonist. [The decline of respect for cartoons at the New Statesman has been written about with far more style here by Martin Rowson].

The photo-montage is ubiquitous now. And let me say right here that I have no quarrel with montage in general; nor even good satirical montage work (here, for example) based on clever ideas. Cartoonists have been selectively using montage to good effect for a long time (Scarfe, Steadman, Heath etc.); it's just another tool in the toolbox. I guess, as ever, the chasm between good and poor work is greater than that between genres. But the problem for me arises in its use as a cheap, crass alternative to drawn illustration. The sad truth is that anybody with a copy of Photoshop and access to a good photo library – that is, everybody who works in a newspaper office - can produce an adequate photo-montage illustration.

Photography, for all its art and artifice, suggests the real world; the realm of reportage rather than comment. In contrast, a drawn cartoon exists in a fantasy world, but one with its own, albeit sometimes ridiculous, self-consistency. Photo-montages sit, rather uncomfortably, somewhere between these two poles. And that’s why they don’t hack it.

First, they lack the coherence of the cartoonist’s drawing style; the photos will all have been taken in different light, probably with different zoom magnifications and the faces will have different, inappropriate expressions. To rectify this, the “montagiste” will stick a smile from one photo on a dour face from another photo. I suppose you could say that this all adds to their post-modern fragmented chic, but that sounds more like a man trying to defend his act of crapping on your doorstep by pointing out the resonant sense of dislocation implied by the cheeky counterpoint of turd and doorstep.

Second, the montage maker will always be wanting for source material. Even with the biggest photo library in the world, the perfect facial shot for his/her montage will always remain elusive but the cartoonist, meanwhile, has an infinite supply of facial expressions at his/her disposal – in his/her head and hands. The subtlety of that expression is the very heart of the cartoonists’ art.

But most of all, most photo-montages lack any charm or grace.

Maybe Photoshop is the industrial loom that will render us cartoonist-Luddites useless. If so, maybe it will have been our own fault. Just take a look at the internet. It’s crammed full of very poor caricatures and cartoons which would lead you to believe that all of us are “wacky”, “zany” hobbyists, the limit of whose talent is to draw big, badly drawn heads on unfeasibly small bodies of politicians and call ourselves satirists. Maybe our own shoddy, manual “weaving” was the mother of the invention of this digital “loom”.

Maybe. But I don’t think so. I think there is a future for good cartoon illustration, just as soon as Boxing Day comes and everyone’s bored with their new Photoshop toys. There is something timeless about homo sapiens picking up a stick (charred, inky or digital) and creating a picture. The best of it is fantastic. Will we, in a few decades’ time, be looking back admiringly at the work of great Photoshoppers in the same way we now do of cartoon illustrators like Bateman, Thelwell, Searle, Steadman and the like? I think I know the answer.

art or what?

nospam@example.com (Andy Davey) — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 17:26:24 +0100

A wonderful Dave Brown cartoon sold recently at a Bonhams auction of the late Tony Banks' cartoon collection for the handsome price of £8400GBP. This must bring a tear to the eye of the venerable Brown, having seen not a penny of this largesse.

Dave's artwork is perhaps a paradigm (ah, that much misused word) for cartoon work in general. He's one of the best cartoonists around, and probably THE most consummate draughtsman of the "Fleet Street" cartoonists, bedecked as he is with garlands and prizes. I have absolutely no doubt the cartoon is worth that amount of money, sold in the company of Reynolds's and Raeburns in a Bond Street saleroom. But if you tried to sell it in a cartoon gallery, it wouldn't fetch anywhere near that. And what if it were offered on eBay? I suspect it would have trouble reaching treble figures. Moreover, The Independent would have paid a fraction of the above price for the original published image. It's all about context, context, context.

A lot of cartoon art produced by nationally published cartoonists is of a very high standard and involves an unusual collection of skills and knowledge - a fact which is well appreciated in most of continental Europe, but not the UK. The problem is that it has a "humour" label, which immediately seems to devalue it in the eyes of the average Brit. Maybe it's because we all think we're natural humourists and could rattle a cartoon off in a minute or two, if we wanted to.

I have a feeling the problem’s compounded by the mindset of the average cartoonist (yes, including me). The old journo’s overheard comment that “cartoonists will work for anything” is sadly all too true. So, time to grow some serious art-house egos, develop some social maladjustments (aside from the usual cartoonists’ infelicities like an unhealthy love of jazz or sweaters) and proudly call ourselves artistes, I reckon.

Mine’s an absinthe, s’il vous plaÎt, Henri.

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