Birth of a Notion

When people ask "where do you get your ideas?", the correct answer is "I stare out of a window, allow my eyes to unfocus, turn my mind into reverse gear, and rinse and repeat for four hours". The difficulty is enormous. To catch flying ideas, a cartoonist must always be prepared with a notebook to take down suggestions, observations and rarely of all, a real event that can be made into a cartoon.

Observation of people and events is common to all creatives. Cartooning is not so different from writing. You can spoil a very good joke with a bum punchline, one that is too wordy, or fails to have enough, one that merely underlines the scene rather than adding to it. The crimes are many and rarely are they spotted with such care unless one is under the eye of a fellow cartoonist, or even worse, the cartoon editor.

Everyone else merely says it is funny or not funny, which is how it should be.

Anyway, drawing cartoons is the least of it. The writing really does matter, and I can spend a long time just looking a picture that I have drawn, wondering what it was meant to say.

I mentioned last week that the New Yorker had published a quiz of cartoons for muggles to assess. Thanks for all the emails letting me know you got five out of five, by the way. Yes, it appears that I am a muggle in my own profession. However they've gone one better and thrown open a contest in which you must create your own cartoon.

Don't worry if you can't draw. The New Yorker has sorted that for you. You can choose different elements from a pre selected set up, though you'll have to register. In my opinion this is actually a lot harder than just having a pen, paper and some intoxicants to hand, but have a go here.

Here's mine, after ten minutes of deep thought:

Eyes On The Prize

Nobody Understands the New Yorker's Cartoons

Have you ever been told something is hilarious, only for you not to get it?

The New Yorker kindly gave a guide to understanding it's famously inscrutable cartoons this week.

I am a big fan of the cartoons that the magazine selects. Some are dry, some silly, some just fatuous. I get them, though. Of course there are plenty that resemble the "laughing squares" that Family Guy talks about, but Family Guy is an amalgamation of many cartoon styles and rips, including the New Yorker.

Taking the piss out of the New Yorker is easy, but before it, cartoons looked like this:

(Cartoon courtesy of lordprice.co.uk)

Nobody understands cartoons like these now, unless you happen to be a cultural historian of the Victorians. Then you might find them funny. The New Yorker changed cartoons into something quite different, less laboured in both ink and text.

New Yorker cartoonists like Saul Steinberg and Charles Addams created modern cartooning. In the pages of the New Yorker, they introduced surrealism into cartooning, the ability to have anything on the page, be it talking animals or postmodern rocks, and established the eternal themes for cartoonists, men on desert islands, Death calling at your suburban home (Family Guy rips this joke pretty consistently), the bloodsport of manners over dinner tables, the boss behind his boardroom desk, aliens landing, and most telling of all in New York, the psychiatrist's couch.

The eternal lot of the cartoonist, courtesy of Roy Delgado. You can read his blog here

New York saw the birth of the lifestyle psychiatrist, the one that attends the dissatisfied and the angst ridden. Since this pretty much describes the lot of your average cartoonist, the psychiatrist's couch is an eternal theme because anyone, anything, can be there and be said. A universal theme for cartoonists, but one best done by Americans. They have a better ear for neurosis than the British, we're just whingers.

So we'd be lost without the New Yorker. No Family Guy without the New Yorker. Okay, maybe not. But Family Guy really is a series of small cartoons stuffed into a show. Three lines of blah, then someone gets hit in the face by a rake or there's screaming. In between they hit onto show tunes sung with gusto. There's no plot and you don't get it, but you can't take your eyes off it. You don't need to even watch a whole episode. You can just pick it up anywhere. In a word, I don't get Family Guy as a whole, but I keep watching to see if I will.

However, if you want to see if you get a cartoonist's mindset, you may take a quiz, pinning the right cartoon to the right answer.

Try the New Yorker's QUIZ to understand their cartoons here. I got 4 out of 5.

Books Do Furnish A Room

I'm moving!

This has been prompted by Hammersmith, which has just got a bit crazed recently. First there was the car that crashed into the garden wall outside the flat. Then there was the madman who invaded the council offices and brought all of London's armed police down to King Street, next another unrelated madman who held up a chicken shop with a machete, and then finally, there was dead alcoholic that I saw prone outside "Booty Food and Wine" being levered into an ambulance. None of this would bother me very much were it not for the fact that Hammersmith is drunk paradise and the prices are outrageous. The council is right wing insane and wants to wipe out the remaining council estates along the river so it can build penthouses for the rich, while doing precisely zilch about children that drink under the arches of the council building and the homeless problem that is multiplying.

So, I decided to head South. East London is no longer cheap either. When you've got girls called Cameila telling you that Bethnal Green is "super" then you know its over, over, over. I went to Mulletover last week and that was pure East London. I'd never seen so many mustaches and American Apparel, but I knew that wasn't really my home either.

So, I've got me a house in Forest Hill, a nice Victorian house. It has period features, including an outside lavatory. Thankfully it has an inside lavatory as well. Unusually for London, some bastard hadn't painted everything white, stripped out the light fittings, cornices and staircase. Even more unusually, it hadn't been turned into two poky flats either. There's a nice garden with a view down to Canary Wharf and the City, and its hella quiet. No drunks, no cackling, no mad people with machetes, just quiet.

This also means packing, which is awful. This time I am biting the bullet and giving away a lot of books. You can't sell books, people don't want them, especially my perculiar collection of Left Book Club remnants and socially right on literature. So I will fillet the good ones and post them up for those that want them. The remainder will go to the Amnesty Bookshop for an unknown Guardian reader to hoover them up.

Eye Eye

An Up and Coming Area

For the Greater Good

This is the final report of the Committee for the Greater Public Good, after a twenty year research period into the use of politics in the United Kingdom.

Politics is harmful to its users. Frequent users will be overly shrill and appear to have disordered speech patterns. Try asking a politics user some questions - often their responses will appear incoherent and totally unrelated to the topic under discussion. Users may seem to be crave intimacy and repeat simple minded phrases such "we are the people", "there is evil in the world today", and most sinisterly, "I did what I believed was right".

Physically politics users age rapidly under the influence of the drug, with brains and liver frequently damaged beyond repair. The heart is weakened with prolonged use of politics, together with a gross enlarging of the bile duct.

Politics is most addictive drug because of the total high it produces. Users report feeling waves of omniscience coupled with an overwhelming desire to procreate, either by legislation or traditional means. Why politics is such a destructive social menace is due to the impact that its use has on the wider community who are not users of the drug. Indeed, it is estimated that there are 614 major users in Westminster alone, and yet the influence of their habit is felt countrywide. The user is unique in consuming the drug and yet spreading its influence for further possible highs.

Consumption of the drug is achieved by wearing a blood restricting tourniquet known as a "collar and tie". The effect of the drug is heightened by restricted blood flow to brain, producing an intense high which may led to spontaneous laughter when nothing amusing has occurred and gurning expressions which partially resemble the smile.

Long term addicts, as opposed to occasional users such as journalists, will often experience cognitive disassociation and if addiction persists, moments of delusion and severe hallucinations can result.

Addicts in the later stages of addiction will often exhibit bizarre behaviour which resembles the symptoms of a psychotic episode. Look for the following:

• Delusions

• Hallucinations

• Speech that is markedly disorganized

• Behaviour that is markedly disorganized or catatonic

While users at all stages of addiction will exhibit one of these characteristics, the long term addict can be identified by exhibiting all of these symptoms at the same time.

Recovery from an addict to politics is rare. Despite many rehabilitation attempts by means of psychotherapy and a drying out period, the failure rate is high. If we examine this graph of recovery rates by Dr Herman Von Bitterschon, we can see that the prognosis is not good. Taking the vertical axis as the percentage of addicts who exhibit symptoms of addiction, it is not unfair to speculate that the effects of addiction are permanent and destabilising.

The social devastation of addiction is often extreme, and long lasting. There is no effective cure, other than to isolate the addict and wait for delusions to fade.

Worldwide, the scope of politics as a dangerous drug continues to grow. There is evidence that addicts congregate in groups where the drug will be freely exchanged for humiliating acts such as telling lies, giving newspaper interviews and kissing babies. The addict is permanently rooted in his experience and withdrawal from the drug produces eccentric behaviour such as autobiographies with fantastic versions of events and their own personal mission while on the planet.

Politics is a dangerous drug. It is the conclusion of this independent review that its scope should be limited as far as possible, and accordingly, it should be placed in Class A bracket due to both its addictive qualities, undesirable effects on wider society, and lastly the complete assault on sanity that it demands.

The Freedom of the Seas