Matt Buck’s Hack Cartoons Diary

Here is a brief and slightly belated, visual report on a very interesting evening at the Telegraph Media Group. It was a meeting arranged by members of the old media, who are very interested in the opportunities presented by the new. Kudos to all who arranged and attended, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The changes to the industry and the way it has operated are going to be huge.

The gag above owes much to the great British cartoonist Larry – Terence Parkes – who had a wonderful and extremely long-running series of visual jokes based on the statues made by Auguste Rodin. Sadly, Larry died a few years back, but there will be a pint or two sunk in memory of this brilliant craftsman at the Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival at which I’ll be appearing later this week.

When the inhabitants of a country start blowing up bridges across physical dividing lines like rivers, you know that country is falling apart.

Don’t miss Birds of War if you are in London anytime until the 17th of April. A fantastic exhibition of art by people from Iraq, Jordan and for some old-style Brit angst, Northern Ireland.

It’s an excellent exhibition.

The well-intentioned arguments for attempting to regulate the web are daft.

There’s a great fear in some news businesses and they aren’t willing to accept both the good and the bad about human behaviour and favoured methods of communication.

I shall be drawing at the Shrewsbury cartoon festival during the weekend of April 20-22.

This is a fantastic annual event organised by a group of Britain’s very best cartoonists and very kindly supported by Shrewsbury and Atcham District Council.

This year, I have to draw in the town square on a very large board, 8 feet wide by 6 feet high – with lots of folk peering over my shoulders. The theme is trade and business.

Here’s a small diagram giving you an idea about the relative proportions of this board and as you can see, it’s going to be an interesting challenge. My colleague Royston Robertson is also on Big Board duty this year and you can almost see the fear in his recent blog entry about it.

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes!

The Ministry of Defence is (hastily) reviewing the situation about allowing members of the armed forces to sell their ‘unique’ story to the media. There has been an awful lot of negative coverage of this decision.

Here, there are two links to either side of the argument – and a thoughtful comment piece from Peter Preston, ex-editor of The Guardian, about why any of this matters.

The Guardian
The Telegraph
Preston

UPDATE:
An excellent post on the hypocrisy surrounding the condemnation of the ‘sell-out’ sailors is available courtesy of Mark Crail.

Also, the Iranians officially ‘celebrated; (and promoted) increased production at their Natanz nuclear plant. This is basically a great big up yours to the UN, the rest of the world and particularly, George W Bush.

© Matthew Buck Hack Cartoons

A British killing. The image was originally made in 2007.

The benefits of talking

But I wonder how likely they are to release their influence in Baghdad? Yup, not very.

I don’t draw gag cartoons very much – as one of my professional colleagues kindly put it, you’ve never been funny – he may well be right.

The drawing here was an attempt to ‘make humour’, which unusually, I did actually submit to a magazine. I’m told the editor said it was too political. It was about the time everybody was very worried about enriched uranium in Iran.

The ‘Get Gordon’ campaign continues. The Tories appear to believe that David Cameron will stand a better chance of victory at the next election against David Miliband and are busy encouraging Labour to try and self-destruct completely by encouraging him to run against the chancellor.

The Labour party seem to be torn between a fear of Brown and desperation to be somewhere, anywhere, beyond Blair.

Elsewhere, I believe Mong Campbell has recently acquired a new pair of slippers for the local election campaign.

I hesitate to describe the situation with Iran as light relief, because it certainly isn’t for the 15 navy personnel, but if you try to see it in the context of the arguments over Iranian nuclear ambitions, the major war going on next door in Iraq and the fag end of George Bush’s presidency, you begin to see how complex the situation is.

Your weekly guide to all that’s new and interesting in how to tell the news.

Ian Reeves

This one’s got a lovely clip toards the end about an American cartooning colleague of mine, Kevin Kallaugher or Kal.

In traditional fashion, after hard service for the Baltimore Sun, Kevin’s job became surplus to editorial requirements. He responded in the best (fingers up) fashion, by going off and doing something altogether more interesting. Watch the video Ian has put together to find out what.