Matt Buck's Hack Cartoons

In between this year's festivities, I have been covering the editorial slot for Dave Brown at The Independent. Here's a drawing for the 27th, a generic, where are we at the turn-of-year-image.



I was drawing this at about 2pm on Boxing Day when the news broke about the refusal of Saddam Hussein's final appeal and his impending execution.

The breaking news meant drawing a quick response, which is shown below. It'll be interesting to see which, if either, makes the paper.

A marvellous blog entry by my enviably talented colleague, Morten Morland, who draws for The Times among others.

He writes about the future for cartooning in the fast changing media world, where the money and the customers are moving away from print.

American political cartoonists are getting the picture, and so it seems are increasingly the American newspapers too. As more and more of the focus is shifted towards the web, newspapers in Britain too will have to realize the full potential of the medium. That means, unfortunately some might say, that the trade will have to change too. Journalists will be working in different media to different deadlines. The traditional first, second and third editions will soon make way for continuous coverage.

Even for the less technologically challenging options though, there will be many issues facing cartoonists in this transitional period.Time for example. At the moment it’s very difficult to make a decent animated cartoon in the same time it takes to do a normal cartoon, yet the preassure to respond to events will only increase with time. Can you realistically do everything on your own without help?
Money. Because of the time you spend, and the equipment needed, animated cartoons will cost more to make, but will newspapers want to pay more?

Morten

And here's one of my own attempts to learn

Animation

And it goes on.

The government and the Saudi arms deal

THursday 14th December, talk about a good day to bury bad news.

Also vying for the headlines, the Ipswich murders, the Diana report and the closure of thousands and thousands of post offices.

PM and the cops

When miserable news events coincide.

PM lectures Iran (again)

Ipswich

I learned a new piece of jargon at one of my workplaces this week - multi-sourcing. It means outsourcing or offshoring jobs to more than just one supplier. This is because business has started to hear the customer noise about poor service from the huge long-term deals it has been signing in the past few years. It made for a nice reinterpretation joke.

There is a public row about whether Britain is becoming more or less religious because of the 'lack' of suitable imagery on greetings cards.

Telegraph story

The Daily Mail have also been running a campaign for a traditional festive season - sorry, Christmas.

Mail

The original survey of about 5,500 cards sold in well-known High Street stores, including WH Smith, Clinton Cards and Hallmark, found that fewer than 70 – just over 1 per cent - had images linked to the Nativity scene.

The survey also found that while about 2,920 cards had the word 'Christmas' on their cover; the majority did not have a message inside, and simply wished the receiver 'Seasons Greetings'.

Shocking stuff, I'm sure you'll agree, but perhaps not-so-surprising when you consider that the regular worship-attending percentage of the UK's population is regularly cited at around 10% .

This despite the 72 per cent of the population said they were Christian in the latest Census, and more than 77 per cent who claim some form of religious affiliation.

Anyhow, in cartoon-land, it all got me thinking about the traditional exchange of greetings cards, what was old, and what was modern and that took me to a long-standing exchange of views, which happily was also getting lots of coverage in the news.

PM and Chancellor's christmas cards for 2006



(If you see a picture which makes absolutely no sense at all in relation to this post, then you need to download flash player, which you can find here).

Player

One of the cartoon year's big events took place last night - the Political Cartoon of the Year competition.

Organised by the Political Cartoon Society and held at The Economist, it usually draws a decent crowd of cartoonists and lovers of bad taste jokes. Hence it's usually good fun. There's a nice audio report on the event below, done by Matt Tempest from the Guardian.

Listen

For the record, Peter Brookes of The Times won overall cartoonist of the Year, for his entire annual output (well-deserved) and Dave Brown (of the Indy) narrowly snatched the one-off drawing comp from his colleague Peter Schrank.

Then we all had a drink.

My non-winning entry (sigh) is below.

Prescott on the beach

Here is the Blog Digest 2007 - thousands of words finely crafted and then distributed by some talented writers, masquerading as bloggers. At the request of the fine people at Friday Books, Mr Justin McKeating collated the collection. You may find relevant links over on the sidebar here - both well worth a visit, but here they are again anyway.

Friday
McKeating

The book is published by Friday Books - and I can highly recommend it, not least beacause I drew the cover and all the inside panels. There you go, a straightforward declaration of an interest in something I'm promoting.

You can (and should) buy it from Amazon link below.

Buy it

Yours-chuffed-at-the-print-stage.

Dear everybody resident in the UK,

I'd like to wish you a seasonal greeting on behalf of the campaign against compulsory national identity cards for all. And here is this year's christmas card.

I can talk at length about this, and why it's a disaster in the making, aside from privacy issues, but I shan't, and instead I will refer you to the excellent campaign site, which you may find here

Link

Incase there are some of you who might like an alternative view, here are links to the Home Office and some excellent impartial coverage from Computing newspaper (for whom I work).

Home Office Link
Computing Link
Recent ID news

My long-suffering partner sent this to me today - what do you think she's trying to say?

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)