Right! Tea-break over.
Time to resume blogging after taking a short sabbatical (did anyone notice?).
If it’s achieved nothing else, starting this blog has at least led me back into the mind-set of a cartoonist, or more significantly, wanting to get back into that state of mind.
There’s no better way of doing this than by interacting with others of the same ilk, so I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time on the forum of the UK Cartoonist’s Club. It was with some trepidation that I started to contribute to a few of the threads, expecting a “Who the Hell are you?” kind of reaction from its members. However, nothing could be further from the truth. There seems to be no closed-shop or inner-circle, and there’s usually a nice mixture of serious discussion and insane banter going on.
Some weeks ago someone on the forum came up with the suggestion of a weekly competition, whereby a caption would be provided and we would post our drawings. We would then vote 1st 2nd and 3rd positions for the entries received. The “prize”, other than the accolade of winning, would be to choose the next caption.
The challenge of competing with some of the best professional cartoonists in the business was just too much to resist.
First week - no points
Second week - no points
Third week - a few points
Fourth week - came 3rd equal!
Fifth week - couple of points
Sixth week - a few points
Seventh week - Bingo! I just went and won it. And that, believe me, has given me one hellava buzz.
So naturally, I feel it would be appropriate to display the magnificent winning entry on this website.
Nothing of course is completely original, and this cartoon is no exception. I have to attribute it - partially - to a cartoonist called Timothy Birdsall. Even if you never saw it, I’m sure everyone (in the UK at least) has heard about That Was The Week That Was, the ground-breaking satirical Saturday night show in the early sixties, where David Frost, as the link man, made his first major contribution to television. Timothy Birdsall was the resident cartoonist who would enthral me every week with his stand-up act, lampooning everything in sight with his pen and flip-chart. It was a huge loss to the world when he died of leukaemia in 1963 at the tender age of twenty seven. One of his published cartoons has left its imprint on me, and this, for me, has to be just one of the greatest gags of all time.
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About being gay
Recently I unearthed my paperback copy of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. This book, as you’ll see from the cover, cost me five shillings and is the fifth reprint (1968) of an edition first published in 1962 by J. M. Dent and Sons. The front shows a picture of the poet in profile with his trademark cigarette protruding from his mouth.
The back cover is given over to extracts of reviews from a number of different journals; and this is one of them.
It’s always a bit of surprise to see the word “gay” portrayed in its original meaning, but this one also gave me a bit of a chuckle. To associate a macho, hard-drinking heterosexual, such as Thomas, with anything remotely “gay” is, (to me anyway), quite comical.
It would be interesting to know if the next reprint retained the same quote, because it was at about this time that the word was adopted by the homosexual community. The consensus seems to be that its modern connotation came into common usage around 1970.
Strange, isn’t it? Anybody aged about 40 or younger (probably half the English-speaking population of the world), has never known the word to have any other meaning!
Certainly, by 1985, when Microholics was published we were well into the gay=homosexual scenario. In The Future section of the book, there was this one:
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