Last night was the preview of my
first solo exhibition of cartoons. It was held in the rather smart Art Bar Café
Open Mind in Carlisle, which is run
by a very nice Polish chap called Sebastian. The exhibition (entitled NOW IT
CAN BE TOLD!) was a collection of twenty-four new cartoons all based around
significant historical events that have been slightly ‘altered’ and was
supported by some of my earlier work. I've included some of the cartoons in this post, but if you want to see them all you can find them on my website www.stephen-mitchell.co.uk.
What follows is the speech I gave. I hope
you like it.
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| Exhibition Flyer |
I’d like to thank everyone for
coming here tonight. As the flyers for this event state this is my first solo
art exhibition. I’ve never been called an artist before, unless you count the
times when my friends in Saudi Arabia referred to me as one, although that
didn’t really count as they generally prefixed it with the verb piss. It’s taken a long time for the art
of cartooning to be recognised as an art form in its own right. Yorkshireman
Glen Baxter, who has been a huge influence on me, has been exhibiting his cartoons
all over the world for over thirty years, and more recently, Kiwi Dylan
Horrocks has created a massive impact with his books Hicksville and Sam Zabel and
the Magic Pen. You may argue that cartooning is not really an art form but
not everyone can do it, especially when you’re often working very quickly.
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| Title: Too Much On My Mind |
Back in 1988 I was in the Royal Air
Force stationed in Belize in Central America. When I applied for the post the
Local Overseas Allowance (what we got on top of our usual salary) was £10 a
day. Typical of the run of luck I was experiencing at the time, on the day I
arrived in Belize the Local Overseas Allowance dropped down to zero. I had a
family to support back in the UK and I couldn’t very well spend my wages on the
drinking habit I intended to foster while I was away from them. I had to think of a way of indulging in my
deep love of alcohol without actually spending any money.
I achieved this by spending my
nights in Bob’s Bar and drawing cartoons of the people there. Bob’s Bar was
situated behind the Nissen hut where we lived and it was a bar only in the
vaguest sense of the word. It was more like a concrete room that contained an
unlimited supply of beer. It had windows without glass and a roof made from
palm leaves that was home to an assortment of biting insects that could at the
very least give you something that would empty your bowels every thirty seconds.
My remit was that if I could draw a vague likeness of someone in two minutes or
less that other people could recognise then that someone would buy me a drink.
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| Title: Big Sky |
We generally started drinking at around six in the evening
and by 10.30 I had begun to dribble down my shirt and my cartoons resembled the
kind of scribblings that a serial killer might have etched onto his own skin
with a protractor in his spare time between victims. To get extra cash I would
spend time on a more detailed cartoon of someone (obviously, when we were both
sober), picking up some of their unique qualities and focussing on the stupid
things they had done, usually in a state of intoxication. I still have copies
of all the drawings I did out there and I intend to use them should I ever
decide to pursue a career as a blackmailer.
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| Title: Where Have All The Good Times Gone |
Three years after returning from
Belize my wife divorced me for being (and I think these are the words she used)
a philandering twat. I moved into the Sergeants Mess and had very little money
to support myself. I joined a group of guys at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire
who were all divorced for also being philandering twats and we were
collectively known as the Sad and Lonely
Boys Blues Club of Lincoln. We were all aware that our respective marriages
had failed because of our own stupidity, lack of respect for our previous
partners and our inability to say no when something was offered to us on a
plate. And so to remind ourselves where it all went wrong we chose as our club
motto the words: Cock On, Brain Off. The reason I mention the Sad and Lonely Boys Blues Club of Lincoln
is that it was one our members that got me back into drawing. He asked me to do
a caricature of his sister and he paid me £50 for it. Fifty quid! That was like
a King’s Ransom for me at the time. What it did, though was provide me with
more business. From the proceeds of the drawings I did at the time I was able
to raise enough money to buy Christmas presents for my kids and have a good
time for myself – all without ever involving the taxman.
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| Title: Death of a Clown |
Both in the RAF and as an MOD Civil
Servant, I wrote and drew a number of comic strips for various in-house magazines.
These usually started off well but somewhere along the line they invariably
landed me in trouble. In the December issue of the RAF Brüggen Station Magazine
I was given a full page to advertise a load of obviously bogus Christmas
presents for children. One of them, which caused a flood of complaints and
landed me with a lifetime ban from ever submitting anything ever again, was a doll I'd invented called Foul-Mouthed Fiona, who would emit a torrent of abusive language
whenever a string on her back was pulled.
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| Title: Situation Vacant |
At RAF Marham, my friend Phil Gibbons and I created a full-page monthly comic strip called They Came
From Outer Space But Spoke Our Language Perfectly. One storyline was about
the religion of the alternative world where our two alien characters hailed
from and a jumped-up, Bible-bashing corporal reported me to the Padre and
pushed for him to get the Station Commander to charge me with blasphemy.
In a comic strip about a day in the
life of an RAF Unit that my friend Andy Bunkle and I drew over 24 hours for charity,
one section was about RAF Police Dog Handlers. An RAF Police Dog Handler was
known by everyone (apart from other RAF Police Dog Handlers) as A Brain on a
Chain. In the strip two RAF Police Dog Handlers are walking their dogs around
the perimeter of the Unit and they are talking about the soap operas and game
shows they had watched on TV the night before, whilst the two dogs are talking
to each other about existentialism, suggesting, of course that the two dogs
were more intelligent than their handlers. The Station Commander politely told us
that unless we wanted to run the risk of being set upon by a rabid German
Shepherd in our sleep then we should remove that particular section of the
strip before it was published and went on sale.
I was asked to cease my three year
run of a strip called Pond Life, the
title of which was a dig at the incompetence of the higher management where I
worked (although they didn’t realise it at the time) because of a strip I had written
lampooning the unavailability of a new and ineffective Stores Management System
that had already wasted millions of pounds of tax payers money but was still
being championed by the higher management (the rumour was that they were all
receiving illicit back-handers from the company who were supposedly developing
it). The reason the strip caused such a fuss was that it just happened to go
into print on the very weekend the actual Stores Management System crashed
and burned forever. Not long after that the cartoonist for the MOD-wide
magazine Paper Clips retired and I
was chosen to be his successor with a strip call The Office That Time Forgot, which was about dinosaurs in suits. I
managed to get two of the strips published before the hierarchy pulled it once
they realised that the dinosaurs in suits were themselves.
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| Title: Starstruck |
I experienced no trouble, however when I was offered the job
as resident cartoonist for the Peterborough United fanzine Posh Monthly, where I created the strip Suited & Booted, which was about the difficult and bickering
relationship between the manager Barry Fry and trainer Wayne Turner after they
had been kidnapped by aliens.
Given that I could have chosen any subject for an exhibition
of cartoons, why then did I choose history? Well, it’s simple really – I like
history. I don’t think a lot of kids today know enough about it or even value
its importance or relevance to the society we live in now. I know that the
historical events I’ve represented here have been slightly adjusted, but if
even one of the cartoons makes someone go home and find out what really
happened then, then I think I’ve done what I set out to do.
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| Title: All Day and All of the Night |
Before I go, I’d like to say that I
think that I’m not the person I used to be all those years ago when I was a fully
paid up member of the Sad and Lonely Boys
Blues Club of Lincoln. The main
thing that changed me and made me who I am today was meeting my lovely wife,
Jackie Owen, nineteen years ago. It was her that encouraged me to begin writing
the blog Travels With My Rodent and
if I hadn’t written that a publisher wouldn’t have come across it and my novella
Permanent Moments wouldn’t have seen
the light of day. It was also her that encouraged me to exhibit my work and to
move forward with my cartoons and comic strips.
So, I’d like to dedicate this
exhibition of cartoons to Jackie, for making me a better person.
At least sometimes, anyway.
A Note on the Titles: I was asked to provide titles for the cartoons, even though the titles were actually on the cartoons already. I ummed and aahed about them for a while until I had a brainwave and came up with the titles you can now see attached to them. The more observant amongst you will already have noticed that all of the titles I gave to the cartoons are also song titles from the back catalogue of that greatest of all sixties bands - The Kinks.Yeah, You Really Got Me!
