I Think This Is An Appropriate Time To Re-post This Drawing.

His body language alone (apart from his incoherent answers) during the Treasury select Committee questions told you all you need to know about this man. Sitting back with your hands clasped behind your head just shows utter disdain for everybody in the room.
His constant flip-flopping over policy, his half-lies over Europe and his actual willingness to lie to the House over his extra-marital affairs should disqualify him from public office. And yet people think he's wonderful! And no I won't stop using exclamation marks!

A Study in Monochrome by Brendan Conan McDoyle

I haven't posted anything since January and we're in the ides of March already!
The depiction of Holmes and Watson, which you can click on to enlarge (I think), was done purely digitally. No pencils were harmed in the making of this cartoon. When I work in this manner I become acutely aware of some of my short-comings, but then it's all grist to the mill and is part of my (exceedingly and tortuously slow) artistic development.
Having said that, I think digitally cartooning can impose some of its own problems on the cartoonist. When I work with pencil and paper, I am aware of the finite space and area in which I am drawing. One's spatial awareness can be a little lost whizzing around on a screen, altering image size, joining enlarged lines etc. On top of which pencil pressure is constantly under control. To a certain extent I know exactly what sort of mark on the paper I will be making, light or dark; and where. Again, on a graphics pad, making marks has (for me) an element of unpredictability. Then again, I have been able to do things on the graphics pad in a blink of an eye that would have created far more work in the three dimensional world. If I make a mistake in pencil, yes I may rub it out, but it may leave an indelible smudge on the paper. And a mistake in Indian Ink... well it just doesn't bear thinking about. Whereas on a pad... Buggered up ink line? No probs, Mr. McGuire. The undo button is your friend. Especially if your bladder is full.
I forgot to mention that the cartoon that led to the red marks on your thigh due to you continually slapping it, was provoked by The Cartoonists' Club of Great Britain's weekly caption competition and depicts are rather tense moment in A Study in Scarlet

David Bowie: Splintered Mirror Memories.

I didn't hear the news until someone told me at work. I was on early shift and the BBC World Service were obviously as equally unaware as I was. Knowledge comes with death's release. Funnily enough I had found a clip of Bowie performing Quicksand with Robert Smith of The Cure just a few days before.
My earliest memory is Tony Blackburn playing The Laughing Gnome on the newly formed Radio 1. I loved it. Any song that mentioned the word belly was a delight to me.
My next memory is Tony Blackburn playing Space Oddity, but refusing to play the last bit because there was some American space mission going on at the time. It was 1969. I wonder what that was all about?
These were all mixed and muddled memories, with an odd dislocation of time and place. Like a fractured mirror reflecting different periods and emotions in my life. The first time I heard Starman was on my transistor radio in my bedroom. It spoke to me in some way. Nobody but nobody wrote songs like that, but it chimed with my state of mind at the time. For some reason I still don't understand, John I'm Only Dancing really struck a chord with me. The music is inextricably entwined with images from a Continental magazine that was published over here under the title of Dracula. It was a mix of horror, myth and science fiction and the mood of the visuals complemented the mood of Bowie's song, if not the lyrics. I don't understand why and I've never really tried to fathom it, but at the time I felt a bit isolated in my own mind from the rest of the world. My life was going through, or had gone through a great deal of change at the time. Other than Starman the Ziggy album pretty much passed me by.
My subsequent aural encounters with Bowie were through the offices of schoolfriends. I have particular memories of the people I was with when we sat down in a cold and sparsely furnished bedroom to listen to Aladdin Sane. Someone's kitchen for Pin Ups. Another bedroom for Hunky Dory. All out of chronological order in terms of release, but this is how I heard them.
Well, time flexes like a whore. The Eighties brought new life in the form of a wife as we danced to Let's Dance with a new-model Bowie. Along with a new wife came a new generation with their own reflections of Bowie.
My children were subjected to all sorts of music during car journeys. Very broadly speaking, they have rebelled against Dad's musical tastes and found tastes of their own, which is only right and proper. Some things stick. A bit of Richard Thompson here. A smattering of Nick Drake there. Steely Dan has passed them by completely, but Bowie...?
In a reversal of roles, my eldest introduced me to Heathen and Reality. And when he, in his turn, got married, his bride-to-be walked down the aisle to a stripped down version of Sound and Vision.
So, do I have a favourite Bowie song? I have favourite Bowie albums, Hunky Dory and Aladdin Sane if only for the sake of nostalgia, perhaps. If I have to settle on one particular track, then it would have to be Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?). Mike Garson's piano solo still thrills me to the marrow every time I hear it.

The End Result of a Warped Mind

This, alas, was my entry for this week's caption competition. There really is no excuse for it and I can only apologize.
Now, regarding the fact that this came about via two pencil sketches - one of which was scanned in for inking - you may have some difficulty in believing what I am about to say.
This cartoon started off as a depiction of Rene Descartes and his dictum; cogito ergo sum. Descartes posited that the senses could not be trusted, so how do we know that we exist at all? He boiled it down to I think, therefore I am. I was thinking along the lines of God disproving, in a very personal manner to Descartes,that his thinking was flawed. Two obstacles stood in the way of me depicting this. Firstly, I would have to draw a cartoon that was recognizably Descartes short of having a huge arrow pointing to him with the appended legend: This is Rene Descartes. Not good art. Secondly, I wasn't clever enough to think of a situation that would highlight Descartes' flawed deconstruction of the self (flawed for the puposes of the cartoon). Okay, so what if I had Descartes writing C.E.S. on a piece of paper, but - in a thought bubble - thinking of bare, naked ladies. His angry wife- hands on hips - would be angrily declaring that that wasn't what he was  thinking ( the philosophy bit - not the bare, naked ladies). As a cartoon, I still think (ho ho!) that it could work, but it would still depend on the viewer recognizing Descartes for who he was.
Fatefully, I took the dog for a walk and began cogitating as I perambulated. I say fatefully, because the result of that walk was the cartoon above. Being of unsound mind, sex reared its ugly glans and ... well, you know the rest.
The guns ( I almost typed weapons, but I think I'm in enough trouble as it is) are a straight lift from Frank Hampson's Dan Dare. You see, nothing is sacred!
How many points did I get? A rather telling zero.

A Series of Minor Katta Strofes.

This, O best beloveds, is my entry for this week's caption competition which was, ermmm, captionless. The theme was 'The Establishment'. So, do I actually need to explain what my entry is all about? Quick answer - most definitely as only one person taking part in the voting seemed to understand my warped and twisted mind (gawd bless yer, Scotty). The Occupy movement have adopted V's Guy Fawkes mask from Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta as a symbol of protest. My thinking was that they may think they are changing society for the better, but all they are doing is cutting down the odd sucker without doing any harm at all to the firmly established plant that sent out the suckers in the first place. Get it? No, and why would you? The word opaque doesn't even start to address this particular cartoon.
Why is it in pencil? Be prepared for a tale of woe.
In the days leading up to the competition date I had been giving 'The Establishment' a great deal of thought. On the Saturday, whilst walking the dog - the best way to perform peripatetic cogitations, I find - I came up with the image of a forbidding wall of closed ranks establishment figures (Crown, Judiciary, Politics, Army and Police) curving around a solitary figure, Everyman. Pretentious? Moi? On Sunday morning I executed a rough pencil sketch of this idea and decided that it was utter poo. Then I thought about the word establish and what sort of things establish themselves. Plants do! and a plant could be a symbol for 'The Establishment' All this week I had been listening with half an ear to a serialisation of a book about Shakespeare's Jacobean plays and the Gunpowder Plot and the court of King James the first of England and sixth of Scotland (Macbeth and Lear and all that). That's how Guy Fawkes and Occupy took root in my mind (root! geddit?). Another very quick and VERY minimalist expression in pencil made my mind up for me. Time was running out now so I had to draw quickly. Another pencilled, but more detailed drawing was drawn up and I scanned this into Photoshop. It was at this point that my tablet software began to play up. It started acting as if it had a mind of its own and started doing things totally unrelated to any movement of my own. Not a disaster, I thought, I shall merely resort to an older technology. That is why I unearthed my home-made lightbox, grabbed a bottle of India ink and a dip pen. I haven't used pen and ink for a long time and to my momentary dismay I found that the ink in my bottle had the consistency of road tar. Undaunted, I reached for my bottle of de-ionised water, kept for just such an emergency as this. After much shaking of the bottle (and a little bit of accidental black spray around the floor, for which I had to stop and clean up before any permanent marking took place) I was ready to execute my masterpiece. Hat, face, body, belt -  yep, no problems there; still have time to... BLOT!
At this point I was beginning to feel that the fates were against me. Time to step back and use more old technology -  a sharpened HB and the result you have already seen.

The Queen, Gawd Bless 'Er!

This is my first entry for the caption competition for a very long time and I think it shows! I usually work on the the tablet at 300 dpi, but I drew this in 75 dpi. It's difficult for me to draw any fine detail at this size and my stylus started to misbehave (delayed marks, eraser actually adding marks, bringing up a brushes menu when least expected - little bloody annoying things like that). Time for a software re-boot. Grrr!

Batman's Fishnet Stockings

Yes yes yes, I know. This isn't the first time that I have put this cartoon up for your delight and delectation, but something rather lovely has just taken place. For the second month running I submitted a cartoon to The Jester, the club magazine of The Cartoonists' Club of Great Britain. So what? I hear you say. So what? SO WHAT? It only got an entire page to itself, that's so what?

It also taught me a few things. The printed image is much darker than the digital screen image. In future I shall also be signing my name on a light, prominent background and not a dark purple one.

Still pleased as Punch, though.