Eagles, comics and magazines at the V&A’s NAL

Comics blog Cor Blimey! has visited the Eagle-era comics exhibition at the V&A and his review starts off cool but warms up.

The Eagle exhibition was mounted by Marc Ward of the National Art Library, which is housed at the V&A – but, despite its size, is easy to miss! The NAL has a very easy to search catalogue - you can just search on periodical names for example – which is useful not only for planning what to see but also for checking dates, publisher (even if they do not have a particular item).

They have complete runs of magazine such as Vogue and while it’s biased towards fashion and design titles, has issues across a range of areas, including international titles It’s a reference only collection but worth becoming a reader if they’ve got what you want.

As an example, I was in there a few weeks ago to look at Dazed & Confused. I could check what the NAL holds and a search on the main V&A website showed that Nick Knight had donated a selection of his photographs and I could look at them too – including prints of Aimee Mullins from the Fashion-Able issue. Tip: search on the surname. And, of course, the NAL holds a copy of last year’s Dazed history published by Rizzoli by Jefferson Hack with Kate Moss on the cover.

Shortlist hits 200 with Steadman / Depp cover

Ralph Steadman cover for Johnny Depp interview talking about Hunter S. Thompson in Shortlist's 200th issue

Free city men’s weekly Shortlist is celebrating its 200th issue with a Johnny Depp article promoting a film adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary. On the cover is an exclusive (to all 523,665 copies) Ralph Steadman cover. Steadman was the Gonzo artist who illustrated several of Thompson’s articles and books, such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Spot the difference – FT and Punch

Catching up on reading at the weekend and this FT Magazine looked so familiar:

FT Weekend Magazine with tennis champion Kim Clijsters on the cover

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then I remembered  this one:

From Punch 15 Dec 1954: 'Her' a magazine spoof with spot colour by Norman Mansbridge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Must be something about the eyes, the position on the page and that shade of red!

It was part of a 5-page skit on women’s magazines by Norman Mansbridge in Punch. Perhaps not an everyday name now, but he was a Punch cartoonist before and after the war, a navy war artist, and later cartoonist for the Daily Sketch. He retired from there to add another string to his bow – cartoon trips for Fleetway and IPC comics, some of which ran for 20 years – among them ‘Fuss Pot’, ‘Tough Nutt and Softly Centre’ and ‘Mummy’s Boy’.

Tripewriter genius of Private Eye at the V&A

The world of print is dragging my time away from the online side at present, delving into the archives at the National Art Library at the V&A for a book on the history of magazine design (1840 to today) and a section on magazine history for The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Also, moving a collection of several thousand magazines has really tested my back in the past few days!

But I note that the V&A is hosting a 50th birthday celebration exhibition for Private Eye in October. There’s one not to be missed. Great journalism (with all its carbuncles), biting cartoons – and at the cutting edge of technology using Letraset, typewriter-produced text [though its enemies might describe it as tripewriter] and offset-litho printing in 1961. Its mode of production would be adopted 15 years later by the Punk fanzines. The magazine has its own page on the event, Private Eye at 50: Making an exhibition of ourselves.

The displays will no doubt focus on the cartoonists – Willy Rushton, Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe to name three – and Private Eye’s bubble covers. But will it give a chance to air photos of old men wearing white vests? Dust off the Fergus Cashin rug? Will Gnitty become a household name? And one for a BBC Radio 4 series – how would the magazine landscape have looked if Private Eye had taken up the offer to write the news pages for Michael Heseltine’s Town?

You know something is doing well when it is hated as well as loved. Such was the venom with which the Eye is (or was) held that the likes of Jeffrey Bernard, Derek Jameson, Clive Jenkins, Ken Livingstone, Spike Milligan, Austin Mitchell, Michael Parkinson, Lady Rothermere and Mary Whitehouse backed the criminal Robert Maxwell in Not Private Eye and his fight to bring Richard Ingrims and pals down. Yet thousands of people rode to the rescue when court fines in losing libel cases to St Jammy Fishfingers and the Bouncing Czech threatened to bring it down.

There’s always someone writing ‘why I’m cancelling my subscription’ (there’s a typical one in Gerald Scarfe’s Drawing Blood, though it might be about a cartoon in the Sunday Times) or ‘why I don’t read you any more‘ letters. And that’s exactly as it should be.

Birthday honours for the magazine world

Colin Firth and Jennifer Earle from 'Pride and Prejudice' on the cover of 'Radio Times'

Some gongs for faces in the magazine world this morning (though not many). Top of the list is Helen Alexander – who becomes a dame – and recently stepped down as CBI president. She was chief executive of the Economist Group for 11 years and is chair of trade magazine group Incisive Media. Alexander followed Marjorie Scardino into the Economist job after ‘Marge in charge’ took over as chief exec of Pearson (and also follows Marge in becoming a dame). The Financial Times (a Pearson company) has reported that Alexander would love to chair a FTSE 100 company (Pearson is one of them), ‘one day’ but ‘I don’t think it is necessarily the right next step’.

Telegraph fashion journalist and US Vogue contributor Sarah Mower is awarded an MBE , as is Clive Collins, cartoonist and illustrator who contributed to Punch from 1964 to its closure, before becoming the Sun‘s political cartoonist and later moving to the Sunday People and Evening Standard.

Jenni Murray, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, also becomes a dame.

One for the female viewership is a CBE for actor Colin Firth. Although The King’s Speech is on everyone’s lips at the moment, it was the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice that established his heart-throb status. Letters to the Radio Times said:

‘Colin Firth is the sexiest person on the screen … The scenes with Jennifer Ehle are truly erotic, and they hardly touch each other.’

Full list of Birthday honours

Pink Floyd cartoon: what’s it all about?

Pink Floyd Richard Right cartoon in the style of Playboy

The more you look at this the more you see: Hugh Hefner, Charlton Heston, Rupert the Bear, they’re all obvious. But why is Charlton shouting ‘Annie Goni!’; who are the ‘wild bunch’ ‘packed lunch’ pair; and what about ‘The puppy ate the guppy’?

If anyone can translate Richard Wright’s ‘Rich right’ cartoon from ‘The Pink Floyd Super All-Action Official Music Programme for Boys and Girls‘, I’d be grateful.

Anna Chapman echoes a WWI spy

Sultry Anna Chapman and her fellow spies have been all over the news, as much for their ineptness as anything else. Their activities remind me of Schmidt the Spy, whose activities amused readers of London Opinion during the first world war. Schmidt was an invention of Alfred Leete, who created the world’s most famous magazine cover.

Like Bruce Bairnsfather’s Old Bill from Bystander, Scmidt was published in a booklet and then as a book, Schmidt the Spy and his Message to Berlin.

The work of both Leete and Bairnsfather can be seen at the Imperial War Museum in London. The museum holds Leete’s original artwork and the omnibus named after Bairnsfather’s Old Bill that took troops to the front in France. The character was so famous that the police were given the nickname after the war (many of them were old soldiers and sported moustaches) – which continues to this day with ITV’s The Bill.

Pink Floyd’s brilliant comic

Pink Floyd played the Liverpool Empire in November 1974 on their Wish You Were Here tour with a brilliant programme. ‘The Pink Floyd Super All-Action Official Music Programme for Boys and Girls‘ was a comic with a two-page cartoon strip for each of the band. Nick Mason and album art specialists Hipgnosis were the brains behind a great concept with art from Gerald Scarfe, Paul Stubbs, Joe Petagno, Colin Elgie and Richad Evans. I remember thinking when I saw the centre-spread cartoon by Scarfe -Why would anyone pay to make themselves look as ugly as that?!

Pink Floyd 1974 tour programme

Martin Sharp and Oz at it again on Ebay

Oz 3 poster by Martin Sharp

A copy of the third issue of Oz – the underground trippy title that brought Felix Dennis to fame – from 1967 is zooming up the Ebay charts with 10 bids reaching £122 – with 6 days to go. Expect a flurry at the end.

This issue has a three panel fold out poster by Martin Sharp and Souvenir Century, the seller, lists the the contents as:

Revlon Invents Wet Lipstick on the reverse. Beautiful Breasts competition. Mike McInnerney graphic, and ‘Tripping and Skipping They Ran Merrily After the Wonder Full Music…’ – Warren Hinkles on Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters and the Acid Tests. ‘Last Exit to Brewer Street’ – article on publisher John Calder. ‘Why Politics is Giving Everyone the…’ – girl-on.-toilet-on-Parliament 2 page photomontage, and ‘An Address to politicians’. Protest Postcards to politicians. Pop and Drugs sections. ‘In Praise of Ugliness’ by Colin MacInnes. Magnificent Failures. Frisco Speaks – Sharp cartoon.

They don’t make them like that any more.

New Yorker’s cartoon capers

New Yorker cover, July 21

US highbrow weekly The New Yorker has got its knickers twisted with its lastest cover showing presidential hopeful Barack Obama as a Muslim with his terrorist wife (complete with US flag burning in the fire of the Oval Room in the White House).

As cartoonist Chris Adams points out in the Telegraph, it’s an image that might work for the magazine’s regulars, but not anywhere else.

‘Any regular reader would immediately ‘get’ that cover as it was intended. A not too subtle lampoon of the exaggerated right wing smears Obama has been subjected to…

‘So the message should be clear.

‘But I’m afraid it isn’t, because taken out of context, it can mean whatever you want it to. And here we come to the internet … As a stand-alone image on the web, it really could be some right-wing website or magazine’s propaganda.’

The Columbia Journalism Review has posted reactions from cartoonists, such as:

‘I think the illustration misfired. The way it turned out it looked like [the cartoonist] was poking fun at the Obamas, and I don’t think that was the artist’s intention: I think he was trying to poke fun at the outrageous lies about the Obamas.’

‘It’s often hard to guess what kinds of misinterpretations people will have on our work. And there’s an element of willful misinterpretation that’s going on here. It’s part of the problem: people are deliberately misinterpreting it because they want to get riled up. It’s something that all editorial cartoons go through.’

‘I don’t think we have to be clear. It’s not up to us to hold people’s hands. There’s a tendency in political cartooning to really hammer down on people’s heads. I want people to be confused and pissed off.’

This cartoonist’s ink will run and run.