h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I sent some (non-h2g2) cartoons to Private Eye yesterday. I tried to make them scrappy and badly drawn, Lord knows how I tried. But I just couldn't do it. They are simple but, damn it, elegant. Private Eye very promptly sent me a rejection e-mail this morning.

Next up, Richard Ingrams and The Oldie. Last time I tried that publication I achieved two rejection post it notes signed by Mr Ingrams himself, and a complete change in cartoonistic style. I fear that his e-mails are not going to be such fun to receive. Hum.

Thanks Amy. Are you all right? Been a bit quiet but I'm not surprised after the various events I read wide eyed in your journal.

Quite a bit of the quietness was due to the fact that I was unable to get online after I left work last Wednesday, because the phone company hadn't hooked up the phoneline by the time I left to catch my plane on Thursday. Then I went to a meet!!!

I'm going to do a write-up, so, since I don't want to tell the same story over and over (already doing it IRL, but without some of the funny understood-only-by-h2g2ers stuff...)

I've got to

Perhaps it doesn't need saying - and if it does it needs saying by someone more articulate and sensitive than I - but some expression of true empathy is bursting from me now that I've read about your rejection letters.

Damn these people! Have they no sense whatsoever?

The colours in the latest 'h2g2 papercuts' - the dark red/blacks,
the sweeping theatrical-curtain strokes of regal drapery, the way the two shades of red manage not to 'clash' except to make the consumptive point! - your genius continues to amaze, even if I don't always say so.

If I were a publisher or had any influence in that regard you would be rich and famous by now. Your 'reclining smoker' still graces my homepage as the sort of 'final word' and now includes a link to yours (even though it says it will link to your archives) so perhaps you should post an archival link on your homepage <biggeyes&gt.

Don't worry that anyone might think you are self promoting! You are. You have to. And soon, the world will understand.

peace
jwf

Looking forward to the write up Amy.

Thanks jwf, as I said to shazz on delivery, I was almost pleased with this one myself (the curtains take on an extra dimension as the picture emerges down the screen, I've found). Perhaps you're not familiar with Private Eye, satirical mag of note, but it's about the last refuge for the cartoonist. Yet they insist on printing the scrappiest stuff, from cartoonists who I know are capable of far better. But look around you: style is only allowed to exist under the self regarding title of 'design'; heaven forfend that it creep into every day life. On calm reflection I say 'thrrrrrrpppp!'.

My archive is linked to my home space from footnote 18 and, in case you weren't aware, AGG/GAG is footnote 15.

Having the distinct pleasure of being human (for the first time!) in this incarnation, I delight in having a full set of fingers and thumbs on each of two hands. Total of ten and I'm usually sucking on one - owing to unrepressed past-life memories of the sweetness of human flesh.

I have learned to count using these digits, but lacking more than ten I get confused when people get much beyond 11. Somehow the concept of ten plus 1 is within my grasp but I tend to take severe avoidance measures whenever I encounter huge scary numbers like 18 and 15.


~jwf~