Carl Giles exhibitions upcoming

From the Guardian last week is an informed and illuminating article on one of my favourite cartoonists; Carl Giles. (Again, as I wrote here, this is all thanks to my father's study and a collection of Giles that still takes pride of place today).

(Giles cartoon from 1980 with carefully placed hanging Rupert in the background)

The Guardian piece concentrates on the dichotomy of Giles, the left winger, working as one of the highest paid cartoonists of the age for Lord Beaverbrook and the Daily Mail. So it seems Giles spent his days subtly trying to annoy the establishment as much as possible:

His first job as resident cartoonist was for the leftwing Reynolds News, and the archive reveals his guilt at abandoning it for the rightwing Sunday Express: "They stuck a cigar in my face," he explained. He never agreed with the Express's politics, but it made him rich: by 1955 he was being paid £8,060 for three cartoons a week and on one occasion, walking back from a good lunch with the proprietor, was invited to choose a car as they walked past a Rolls-Royce showroom.

"Once he became one of Beaverbrook's gang, he was in a class of his own," Hiley said. "He was certainly earning two or three times as much as any other cartoonist of his day."

He got his revenge in jokes like poor slaughtered Rupert Bear - who was also executed by firing squad, and ripped apart by the Family's dog, in cartoons published in 1971. Giles stayed away from the office as much as possible, never attended news conferences, and never submitted drafts of cartoons: they arrived, on or just after the deadline, by taxi from his studio in Ipswich. Subeditors were standing by ready to scour the backgrounds, particularly densely shaded patches or foliage, for obscene outlines or other audacities, and inevitably some got through.

However, the real point of the Guardian article, and the real point of me telling you about it is to point out that there two new exhibitions of his work, which I'm sure will be well worth a visit. Giles' work is too often forgotten when we talk about great British cartoonists:

Giles, One of the Family: Cartoon Museum in London: from November 5.
Town Hall Gallery in Ipswich: exhibition of local scenes in his work: from November 8.

Co-incidentally, this very week, CBR had Carl Giles' profiled in their Stars of Political Cartooning series. (Carl Giles at CBR).

Bunny Suicides banned. Stupidity is so funny sometimes.....

Andy Riley's Book Of Bunny Suicides is a funny book, worthy of a good half hour of chuckles and able to raise a smile whenever I run across it. But there's never been a time, no matter how down I may get when I look at a page and suddenly start thinking it's a good idea to try one of the methods out.

But someone in America thought her son may be tempted. After all, it seems that this one book is responsible for every suicide in China. Sometimes the world is just one big global mess of stupid isn't it?

(Via Neil Gaiman's Journal)

Rare Bill Watterson

For one reason and another I happened to chance upon this website with some Bill Watterson Calvin & Hobbes cartoons I'd seen before but had completely forgotten about. Enjoy.

St Trinian's - the proper version

Boing Boing reminded me that the St Trinian's film came out earlier this week.

And to celebrate this dubious event I've decided to never ever watch it. Instead I'd like to celebrate the St Trinian's I grew up with.

Because, on my fathers bookcase, amongst the classics and the tell tale signs of an English teacher (Shakespeare, Dickens, Orwell et al) were a few cartoon books: Fred Bassett, a Charles Addams, Giles annuals and a Ronald Searle St Trinian's book. Every so often when I wandered the house bored during the endless Summer holidays, I would meander my way into his study and peruse the shelves looking for anything to read. And a deep abiding love of these three books grew and grew.

So St Trinian's for me definitely isn't some dodgy film described by Mark Kermode as "badly written, grubbliy acted, poorly filmed". And it isn't even the much better 1960s films with George Cole and the great Alastair Sim.

It's all about this:

(Ronald Searle's St Trinian's cartoons. Absolute perfection.)

And lucky folks that you are, instead of popping out to get the movie on dvd you can now pop online and get this instead. (Or even better, buy it for me.)

(St Trinian's: The Entire Appaling Business. Ronald Searle. This is the US version of the collection, but looks like it's freely available over here. It just looks so much better than the British version does.)

There's something so wonderfully English about these St Trinian's cartoons, just like there was about Giles and Fred Bassett. They couldn't have come from anywhere else. And most probably couldn't have come from any other time either. The remake of the film seems to prove this. Scheming, devious, anarchic schoolgirls that entertained us in Searle's version merely serve to titilate and make dodgy phone sex gags in the new film. (And yes, I know there were some dodgy Sixth Form girls in the 60s films, but nowhere near the sorts of things I've seen in just the previews in the current film.)

So you can keep your remake. Searle's cartoons are the beginning, the middle and the end of St Trinian's for me.

There's a couple of Ronald Searle sites that look official (Ronald Searle.com and .co.uk respectively) but they're not that great. One of the nicest resources I could find is this good tribute blog and of course there's always wikipedia.