24 cartoons from 2024

2024 cartoons from 2024

Here is my annual Drew's review of the year in cartoons.  2024 was a year of two halves where all my published work occurred in the first half of the year during the period of UK electioneering, and in the second half with the Trump election it all fell apart.

1. Elections

2024 was a year of elections in the UK and USA, but back in January we didn’t know when Rishi Sunak was going to call an election with some people predicting a shock early poll, others a Spring election (they were right), others the Autumn and still others a Christmas campaign.  So this cartoon from the reject pile anticipated a sneaky early campaign.

2 Atlantic Storms

It was another stormy year with Atlantic storms battering the UK at the start and end of the year.  With terrible weather a major conversation starter cartoonists searched for references and I drew this cartoon.  It ended up in the reject pile, but I saw a better published version of this gag later in the year

3. Promises

In an election year politicians suddenly remember the electorate and make all sorts of promises and pledges, that they absolutely intend to keep, to win your vote.  The start of the year with the Conservatives trailing behind Labour the spooky chancellor Jeremy Hunt was looking to see what he could bribe the electorate with paid with cuts later in the parliament.  So this was my rejected cartoon for Valentines day.

4 Willy Wonka Experience

Best local story of 2024 was the Glasgow Willy Wonka experience the amazing AI adverts guided people to a disappointing warehouse close to where I live.  Cue first local news and then international outlets interviewing disappointed families who forked out for tickets, while social media voyeurs revelled in the naff unlicensed characters like 'The Unknown' and the AI generated script.

Kirsty Paterson, the actress who played one of the Oompa Lumpas posted about how they turned up at the warehouse the day before and were given scripts and prompts at the last minute.  She became one of the viral hits of 2024.

5 Labour Bins

Despite having a staggering lead in the poll the Labour strategiests were worried about landing the election victory they desired and so in an effort to appear responsible they ditched some of their green pledges.  This cartoon in response published in March made the Private Eye Annual (first time).

6 Dinosaur Polling

My favourite published cartoon of 2024 was this one from the Eye which showed the polling difference between Mammals and Dinosaurs and fortunately the pollsters were right about Labour v Conservatives (but all over the place in the US).

7 Cartooning for peace

No-one could claim 2024 was a peaceful year in the Ukraine or in the Middle East where conflict escalated to drag in more countries.

The first casualty of cartooning war is the poor dove of peace who gets pictured being battered or ineffective.  I'm as guilty of this as the next cartoonist as this example from the reject pile shows.

8 Doom Scrolling

In a similar vein it has been quite the year for doom scrolling and as a person who likes to catastrophize it has certainly offered plenty of opportunity to anticipate the start of WW3, the end of democracy, the rise of facism, a new pandemic or a hundred other clickbait titles that drive engagement through fear.  As a cartoonist who draws mostly topical stuff for magazine submissions I have to keep slightly abreast of the news but as a human who likes to keep his blood pressure down its also good to ration my intake.

Reject cartoon on the subject of doomscrolling. 

9 National Service

On the topic of new stories that raise the blood pressure the winner by a country mile was Rishi Sunak's desperate headline grabbing pledge to bring back National Service in May which when you looked at the detail behind the ridiculous rhetoric was nothing more than forcing teenagers to do Duke of Edinburgh schemes to convince elderly boomers that they didn't have it too easy.

The military didn't want it, I doubt all the voluntary organisations wanted an influx of young people forced to volunteer, and this parent of teenagers definitely didn't want it especially since it did nothing for them.

The scheme died with Rishi Sunak's election defeat and I hope the idea died as well not to be resurrected by some future right wing populist.

10 Ed Davey - stunt man

Election campaigns are not all trying to halt green policies and dress your teenagers in khakis one party leader Ed Davey of the Liberal Democrats was having a hilarious ball doing various stunts to ensure that at least the photos of him got some media coverage.  Whether it was paddleboarding or going on every ride in Thorpe Park Ed Davey was there like some reality show contestant willing to pitch in for our entertainment.  In the end they did also pick up a number of seats which makes me wonder how the next election campaign will top it.  Here one election illustration I did.

11 Euro 2024

It seemed half of Scotland got on plains, trains and automobiles to head to Euro 2024 in Germany when by some miracle they qualified for the massive tournament only to lose 5-1 in the opening game with Germany.

England on the other hand got all the way to the final for the second time in a row to be beaten by Spain.  On the way it was the usual Gareth Southgate roller coaster with goals and penalties and undeserved wins on the way to ultimate disappointment.  I liked Gareth Southgate but this was his final huzzah so here's a caricature I drew during the England Slovakia game.

12 Jam Tomorrow

Last cartoon I had published in Private Eye from 2024 was in June in the last issue covering the UK election which Rishi Sunak called for the first week of the Scottish school holidays so I was abroad trying to watch election results on Youtube.  Labour won by a lot which was pleasing.

The cartoon ran with a slightly better caption in the Eye but the gist of the joke is that all parties promise jam tomorrow.

13 New Masters

While most people were relieved to get rid of the Tories a new government meant a new cast of characters to draw.  A decade or so of drawing conservatives like Gove, Hunt and a revolving door of PMs left me with only having to draw the opposition figures like Keir Starmer or Wes Streeting who was always on Kuenssberg.  The biggest news in the new cabinet was Rachel Reeves the first female chancellor which you can see a caricature of below.  One tricky thing was my social media following loved to boo the pantomime villains of the Tories but when I started to sketch Labour figures from Kuenssberg I got some push back if I they weren't 100% recognisable or if people felt I wasn't being nice to them.  Since we have at least 5 years of this new administration I'm sure I will get my eye in with the leading figures.

14 Les Olympiques

The other massive sporting event was the Olympic games just across the channel which started with an opening ceremony on the Seine.  We watched some of it but the national broadcaster the BBC only had rights to show a small amount of the events so I drew this rejected cartoon.

15 Kamala

Back in June while our election was still happening Joe Biden had a disastrous debate with Donald Trump where somehow he managed to appear more incoherent and rambling than his fellow geriatric candidate Trump.  The democratic party on the downward slope to certain defeat dithered and then picked Vice President Kamala Harris to be their new candidate.

With not much time to introduce Harris to an already entrenched electorate the DNC had the fact she was (relatively) young at only 60, and a women who could bash Trump on abortion.  She had a much more combative debate with Trump and pundits were predicting a close race (oh how they were wrong).

UK cartoonists looking for a cartooning trope about US presidents quite often settle on the aliens who want to be taken to their leaders.  I must have drawn 3-4 rejected cartoons in this vein but this illustration was probably my best.

16 Aliens and the ISS

One company that had an annus horribilis was American aerospace giant Boeing. In January a 737 Max lost a door plug in flight, and then there were further incidents and whistleblowers leading to concerns about Boeing's quality control and grounding of the 737 briefly.

None of this was helped by Boeing stranding two astronauts in space on the International Space Station due to issues with the Boeing Starliner.  They two astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore were due to be on the ISS for an 8 day mission but ended up with a plan to bring them back in 8 months on a SpaceX vehicle.

The latest Aliens movie Romulus was out this year and because cartoonists like linking two events I drew this rejected cartoon.

Story about astronauts stranded on the ISS and release of Alien movie

17 Parents in Halls

Biggest personal story of 2024 was our eldest left home to live in University halls across the country in September.  We knew at the start of the year that she had her place but we spent months preparing for it and buying things for her flat but when it arrived it was still strange.

One piece of advice was not to go visit your fresher child too often so I drew this rejected cartoon.

18 Trump vs Swift

The biggest culture story of 2024 was probably the end of the Taylor Swift Eras tour that reached Edinburgh in early June.   I attended the first night at Murrayfield with my daughter and her friend and then waited for a tram back to the parked car into the early hours.

While I love Taylor Swift particularly the Evermore/Folklore Eras, Donald Trump does not and when he shared fake AI content of her and she endorsed Kamala Harris, he said he hated her.  Trump's strange VP J D Vance called her a childless at lady which she adopted as her sign off to Trump.

There are a million caricatures of Trump and I drew a few in 2024 but this is perhaps my favourite from this year.

19 Second Asteroid

A second dinosaur and asteroid cartoon to go with an amazing science story to say there may have been a second asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs (except the ones that became birds).

In a news story sounding like a JFK conspiracy the asteroid from 66 million years ago was not alone according to scientists from Herriot Watt and so for an online drink and draw I drew this.

20 Catch!

Elon Musk in 2024 was on a quest to become one of those billionaire super villains that appears in Bond and Hollywood movies.  His antics on Twitter/X and attempt to cosy up to Trump to get a place in his administration drove many on the left to X-odus to Blue Sky and other social media outposts.

Musk is not the genius he thinks he is but the companies he owns do occasionally do cool things particularly SpaceX and space exploration.  In October SpaceX caught a returning rocket booster in mid-air with a tower with gripping arms.  I drew this rejected cartoon.

21 Conservative leadership contest

The first 6 months of the year the Tories dominated the headlines but once their ranks were decimated in the election and Sunak stood down the only story for them was a leadership election that eventually whittled down to Jenrick vs Badenoch which the latter won.  I was glad Badenoch won not because I particularly like her but Jenrick has a tendency to say whatever he thinks would get him elected and went after ECHR and a bunch of other Reform-lite issues.  I drew this around Halloween.

22 Trump and the Quack Doctor

The biggest twist of 2024 was the massive US Election victory of Trump which in hindsight is not so shocking but leading up to the polls was going to be neck and neck and involve lawyers and long waits to see who had won.

The US have a transition period where the new president is elected but not yet in power and gets to spend a few months naming his new cabinet which for Trump was a contest to see which of the worst people he could propose.

RFK Jnr is a vaccine skeptic with lots of strange views about fluoride and how to make America healthy again so Trump made him health secretary then made him eat McDonalds burgers on Air Force One.

I drew this cartoon in the style of Isaac Cruickshank's 1807 the Sailor and the Quack Doctor!  

23 Gregg Wallace and Bosch

Another famous painting parody for Martin Rowson now on Blue Sky draw challenges concerned BBC Masterchef presenter Gregg Wallace who was in the news for allegations that lots of women made about his behaviour on set making them uncomfortable with filthy jokes etc.  He tried to defend himself saying it was all from middle-class women of a certain age and some other celebrities tried to rally to his defence but eventually the BBC dropped him from Masterchef and his future is uncertain.

I tried a straight up caricature of Wallace but ended up putting him into a version of Visions of Tondal by Hieronymus Bosch from 1479.  

24 Peace on Earth

So 2024 ends with Christmas and the story of angels proclaiming Peace on Earth while Russia bombs Ukraine on Christmas Day and Gaza and the wider Middle East is still at war.  Maybe 2025 will see peace return or perhaps more escalation but it would be good to have fewer wars to have to comment on in the coming year.

23 Cartoons from 2023

 As we march through the 21st century every December I post my highlight reels of mostly topical cartoons from the year and this year we need 23 so buckle up...

1. Happy New Year

During the dying embers of 2022 I drew this end of year cartoon showing the baton being passed onto the baby drinking Prime 2023.  Being passed on by the weary 2022 was Covid and war both of which continued to cast a shadow over this year although Covid-19 was more in the inquiry rather than pandemic phase.  War galloped ahead of its fellow horsemen of the Apocalypse to drag more countries into its terrible grip.  I'm sure when I draw this again for 2023/24 the hope will be in the same ... please make 2024 more peaceful than 2023.

2. Valentines Day

My first cartoon of 2023 to make it into print and a Valentine's pun I was quite proud of.  The cost of living crisis keeps making everything more expensive, but on the upside it is a source of gags.

3. Thor day week

Talking of puns I tried to keep the pun ball rolling with this cartoon from the reject bin.  In general I'm in favour of an N-1 working week where N is the current number of days I'm working. 

4. Aesop's Cables

And yet I continued to try and do puns to little effect but I was quite proud of this effort at a time when every local junction was dug up and controlled with inefficient four way temporary lights.

5. Voter ID of Dorian Gray

The government was legislating to get UK voters to produce photographic voter ID at local and general elections in order to deal with "voter fraud" which is an insignificant problem compared with ensuring the general population are actually able to vote and have a recognised form of photo ID other than just a driving license or passport.  The proscribed list came out heavily weighted towards and old age pensioners were allowed to wield their bus passes, but students weren't which tended to favour parties that have older voters (Conservative) vs those who attract younger voters (not the Conservatives).

6. SNP Auditors

In the spring there was a series of stories about the SNP struggles to find a replacement auditor after the previous auditors quit.  The rumours then became a police probe into the SNP that would eventually lead to Nicola Sturgeon and her husband being questioned by the police and allegations around the purchase of a luxury .motor home.  Normally Scottish politics doesn't make that much of splash around the UK press but various SNP in trouble stories did for a time register in the headlines and still rumbles on at a less dramatic level.

7. Pillow Talk

One gag that wasn't topical but got published in Private Eye in May was this one about Pillow Talk.

8. Coronation

The "budget" coronation for the already King Charles was on 6 May 2023 when some folk in the country got excited for the pagentry, Penny Mordaunt wielding a massive sword and some employers (not mine) issuing bonus bank holidays.  I drew cartoons about the stone of destiny and this one from an a pothole's perspective of a street party (also didn't happen here).

9. Slow Marching

The crackdown on "noisy" or "disruptive" protests by a government not fond of scrutiny led to protestors having to adapt their tactics and so there was much talk of slow marching as an alternative to just blocking a road and how the police handled it.  So now the police can enforce some sort of minimum speed limit on people holding banners which lead to this cartoon.

10. Helicopter PM

Rishi Sunak our Prime Minister and executive emperor seemed to never want to take public transport when he could use expensive and environmentally dubious helicopter transport.  Also there was video of legions of police officers having to jog alongs his presidential motorcade when he did use the car,  This led to him being rightly mocked by cartoonists including this one who does have a pet dog.

11. It's a witch-hunt

In June there was a spate of Tory MP's resigning (by being appointed to ridiculous posts like Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead) trigger by-elections, except Nadine Dorries who said she would resign but then dragged it out for months.  One of the most high profile resignations was former prime minister Boris Johnson who was being investigated for misleading parliament but interpreted this as a witch-hunt, political hit-job and revenge for Brexit.  It was the same sort of language former US president Donald Trump was using the other side of the pond as the charges stacked up against him in various states.  All political careers end in failure but not all are accepted graciously and indeed this may not be the end for either of them particularly with the 2024 US Presidential election looming. 

12. New York New York

This year I visited New York for the first time which was frenetic and tall.  Just before I visited at the end of June Canadian wildfires and the direction of wind had turned the air quality in New York from disappointing to deadly and lead to various media pictures of an apolocalpytic orange-tinged Manhattan.  This is the rejected cartoon I drew about it.

13. Holiday Destinations

This cartoon I did get into Private Eye about trying to pick a destination that wasn't affected by wildfires as North America and the Mediterranean  were battling an earlier and fiercer wildfire season.  As terrible as it was for those who lived in these area the media only ramped up the coverage when UK tourists were being evacuated from beaches in Rhodes or elsewhere and having their yearly summer holidays nearly turned into nightmares. 

14. Actor's Strike

This cartoon which appeared in Private Eye was about the SAG-AFRTRA actor's strike which followed that paralyzed Hollywood production from July to it's resolution in November.  There was also a writer's strike about pay, conditions and the use of AI from the Writer's Guild that proceeded and overlapped this.

15. The Twits

Elon Musk managed to kill Twitter at the end of July changing its name to X because a long time ago he'd bought the domain X.com.  The whole year has been a trial for Twitter users as first the platform became less reliable, then the launch of a paid tier meant that the free tier had to be nerfed, and finally Elon Musk did his best to bring back various banned baddies under the guise of free speech while using his platform to weigh in on all sort of issues driving away sponsors in the process.  Earlier in July fellow tech-bro billionaire Mark Zuckerberg launched a Twitter rival Threads which was popular for a while and led to this illustration of the proposed cage fight between them which never materialised.  The whole social media fragmented further as ex-Twitter founder Jack Dorsey threw Blue Sky into the mix if you had an invite and now I have to cross post to about 5 different platforms if I can be bothered.

16. Moon Landings

On 23rd-August the Indian Space Research Organisation landed Chandrayaan-3 a lunar lander/rover near the south pole the fourth country to land on the moon and the first to land near the south pole .  The budget of this mission was a fraction of what other countries have spent to try and land a rover on the moon and indeed only the previous week Russian's attempt to beat the Indians to the south pole crashed into the lunar surface.  This new space race to the moon inspired this cartoon which appeared in Private Eye.

17. RAAC and Ruin

Just before the English schools were due to return the government decided based on "new" information it had received that it had to close a number of them due to the presence of dodgy concrete known as RAAC or Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete.

No sooner had education secretary Gillian Keegan failed to quell concerns than it escalated and it appeared RAAC was in hospitals, prisons and anywhere else where buildings had been cheaply constructed and not replaced.  The government had to appear like this wasn't something it had been warned about for a while and it was willing to do whatever it took to solve it hence Jeremy Hunt found cash down the back of the sofa to solve it.

18. English Autumn

Here is a cartoon on a common theme that I drew at the end of Autumn which Private Eye liked but didn't use for a couple of months due to the glut of river pollution toons that appeared this year.  As a visual metaphor for the rancid mess of a government of 13 years that has allow the corruption of this basic resource for profit was too appealing to cartoonists.  It would be nice however if this wasn't still a cartooning topic in 2024 because the government finally introduced tough enough regulation and fines that private companies didn't feel they could dump raw sewage in rivers with impunity.

19. Long Term Decisions

Tory Party Conference season was seen as yet another chance for a reboot of Rishi Sunak's premiership after a disastrous summer of stories of crumbling concrete in schools etc, resignations and resulting by-election losses.  With no sense of irony Rishi Sunak set out to unveil a series of pledges to try and pull up his poll numbers while claiming they were tough but necessary long term decisions for the country.  An example was trying to up North Sea oil drilling and postponing the ban on petrol/diesel cars while still claiming we were on track with environmental targets in a "pragmatic" way.

20 Planet Earth 3

Apart from Barbie/Oppenheimer one of the cultural events of the year was another Planet Earth season featuring David Attenborough and capturing spectacular wildlife in high definition.  As well as drawing along with the weekly episodes I also got this cartoon into the Eye which lead to some feedback of people telling me their toddler found it hilarious, and another telling me why film sharks are called Bruce.  Apparently "Bruce" was the nickname of the shark in Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" franchise which was then referenced in Finding Nemo where the shark was also called Bruce.  The Planet Earth 3 series was not exclusively about sharks but they did make quite a few appearances.

21 Liz Truss Plot

This is perhaps my favourite cartoon I got published this year based on the famous engraving of the Gunpowder Plot by Crispijn de Posse the Elder (on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London).  Around bonfire night everyone tries to tie current events into the gunpowder plot and Liz Truss and her supporters rather than hiding were plotting with their own take on how the government should be run (because they did so well last time).  I got to redraw the etching in a fun cartoon style.

22 Covid For Christmas

Submitted a couple of months before Christmas this cartoon ended up not being too far off the mark with a number of people I know missing Christmas or the lead up to Christmas with either Covid-19 or strangely resilient colds.  One worry of mine was I had calculated the number of days based on the issue closest to when I submitted this cartoon and the Eye ended up using it in a later issue (the bumper one with four toons) and would they have left the number of days or adjusted it but they nailed it.

23 Conflict Christmas

I'm normally a big fan of Christmas but a couple of things made this year a bit less festive.  On the personal front I took a nasty tumble a week or so before Christmas and thanks to to a jaw injury was on a softer diet of squishy sprouts and no crunchy potatoes.  Also since October 7th there had been a war between Hamas and Israel after a surprise attack into Israel claimed over a thousand Israeli lives and hostages taken,  The ongoing conflict and Israeli invasion/bombing has turned Gaza into a war zone with many civilian casualties and much of the population displaced.  How cartoonists respond to such events has been discussed much this year with some cartoons and comments deemed to have taken sides or be open to allegations of anti-semitism or islamophobia, while others of the "won't anyone think of the children" are dismissed as not having much to say other than war is terrible especially for kids.  

I don't have a regular editorial slot being mostly an on-spec cartoonist so I haven't had to draw anything specifically on this subject and this is about as close as I've come to comment which is firmly in the latter isn't war terrible for kids category.

Of all the things we pass into 2024 please let us have resolved the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine before I have to do another of these blog posts.

A happy 2024 to you all.

March of Robots 2023

 So March of Robots is an art challenge I've done a few times because who doesn't like drawing robots and these days of algorithms suppressing free to play content you need to put something out there.

My original stated aim was that I would do all 31 prompts but I'd limit the to no more 30 minutes work but while I managed all 31 sometimes I would get carried away such as this jungle scene for March 3rd.

Life as a human artist in 2023 is a bit frustrating not only are our tech overlords relentlessly fiddling with their platforms in ways that always seem to give you less visibility, generative art from AI is starting to appear on the platforms where those who type prompts in Stable Diffusion or the like are suddenly "artists" and hoover up the likes and praise from those who surf the content for pretty visuals without considering the effort that goes into creating that content.

Much of the AI chat in March was about ChatGPT-4 the AI language model still in Beta that can write your emails/homework/lazy derivative opinions in seconds.  Elon Musk and others were warning about the disadvantages of the unintended consequences of AI although the intended consequence of devaluing certain human tasks is also pretty horrific.  This entry from March 19 with apologies to the Simpsons and Matt Groening was probably my most popular post.

If you want to be generous to folk you would say we are still pretty enraptured by the novelty of this "free" tool not realizing that eventually it will be monetized by tech overlords so that those who provided the content the machines learned from and those who later leverage it will be lining the pockets of those who merely financed a cloud server farm with software.  In the meantime if you're relying on ChatGPT beware that it's usage is throttled which inspired this illustration from March 27th 

Back to Generative AI art vs human art.  On the Instagram explore page for the hashtag you can still easily spot the AI art that has gained traction even though the competition element of the challenge explicitly banned it.  Perhaps I'm a luddite for not embracing the inevitable rise of the machine learning. The Luddites are a good example of a professional craft who even with their campaigning still lost out to cheap mass produced cloth even though at the high end you might get someone to hand stitch your suit for the average Joe we're happy for robots to make mass produced consumer goods.

The established distinctive artists will still garner commissions and magazine slots but those starting out who rely on smaller commissions for caricatures, book covers etc. are going to struggle when a fast and "good enough" result can be delivered from a web site.

Who knows perhaps we'll leverage the technology is a good way to benefit society, but to do so we'll have to rein in some of the Mega Corps that are charging away with rapid AI development.  This cartoon from the 30th March sums up my mood.

In the meantime even if it not pulling in the big bucks there is a joy in the creation of artwork not just the social media attention for the finished article.  So to finish off March here is another robot