This was my contribution to the weekly caption competition under the aegis of the Cartoonists' Club of Great Britain and clicking on the link will take you to the other entries. Yes, the other four entries. There were only five of us taking part his week. Upon learning this news i rubbed my hands together with glee. With so few competitors I was bound to get a good many votes. What is about to be narrated to you is what the Greeks call hubris. With so little, numerically, in the way of competition and in view of the fact that this is one of my better efforts, a good proportion of the votes HAD to come my way. It is a statistic certainty.
Well, I watched the early voting and thought, do you know what? There is a very good chance that I may win this week's competition. It never crossed my mind to tot up the other entrants post. No, this was all about me me me. So the morning after voting began I went to work and began thinking about captions for next week's competition. Not only that, I actually made a list; a list of captions whittled down to four in number, that I could draw upon when the request came for the provision of creative spring-boarding.
Well, a number of people did, in actual fact, think highly enough of my cartoon to award it their top score. Once the dust had settled and the count was in I scored twenty. Yup, 20, vingt, two-zero. I can't really remember the last time I had such a high score.
I came fourth out of five. There is a lesson to be learned here, but I'm too egotistical to know what it may be.
I shall now strip away the mystique of the creative process and stick the two preliminary drawings I did for this cartoon. The first one is little more than a crude scribble just in order to get the idea down on paper. As I jotted down the gentleman, I thought he ought to be wearing garterettes. Spike Milligan's Q series (possibly - it may have been There's A Lot Of It About) used to have spoof commercials for Threadgold ThoroughGrip Garterettes, complete with a jingle that I can still sing to this day.
A little bit of self-imposed prudery crept in, I notice. In the scribble, the Wardrobe Mistress is topless. In the tighter pencils she's wearing a bra. Perhaps I felt she needed a bit of support. I also made her more the point of focus in the second drawing.
I knew the girl would have to be pretty and well proportioned so I looked at a load of seaside postcards for inspiration. Doing this made me knuckle down and analyse the cartoon figure in all its proportions a bit more and in this respect I think the most successful figure of the trio is the wife.
I shall be moving on to a particular pet project later this week, more of which anon.
