I am away from the computer a lot at the moment, so apologies if any comments take a while to be moderated.

Posted by Dave at 7:00 am on July 20, 2006 and filed under Cartoons, Sundry posts.

5 Comments

Background information for readers in other hemispheres: It is very hot in the UK at the moment owing to the heatwave.

This morning I am going to do some administrational paperwork. You have my permission to give me a strong talking-to if you see me around and about on the internet between now and my 1pm lunchtime.

Thanks for the continued kindly words on Sunday’s post. They are genuinely appreciated.

Posted by Dave at 8:51 am on July 19, 2006 and filed under Cartoons, Current events.

3 Comments

You can see a larger version of this cartoon here. It is also available for republication by paying subscribers – see this page for details.

Thanks for all the kind comments on the previous post. It looks in hindsight as if I was fishing for compliments, which was not my intention. Anyway, thanks for being so encouraging.

Posted by Dave at 11:01 am on July 18, 2006 and filed under Anglican goings-on, Cartoons, Church, New CartoonChurch cartoons.

3 Comments

It was interesting to read some of the comments about my cartoons on Metafilter, from where about 1600 visitors arrived on Friday. Some were along the lines of:

Good to see that the Anglican sense of humour is as bloodless, insipid and dessicated as their religion.

Fair enough. I found this one rather more thought provoking though:

For all the gentle self-mockery of these cartoons, there is something quite complacent about them. They seem designed to prove that ‘we’ (= liberal Anglicans) are better than ‘them’ (= conservative bigots) because ‘we’ are capable of laughing at ourselves. Interestingly, Dave Walker’s cartoons for the Church Times often have a sharper edge, and give the impression of being produced by someone who secretly despises the entire Church of England.

This one is quite a good example of his sharper, more satirical style of humour. This one too. I have to be honest and say I don’t find either of them particularly funny, or even particularly accurate, but at least they express a point of view, which many of the other cartoons don’t. As to why I don’t find them particularly funny .. well, I think the only way to be funny about the Church of England is to treat the whole thing as a surreal fantasy. These cartoons do their best to be surreal, but they don’t go nearly far enough. In fact they are considerably less surreal than the real thing.

I have learned, when viewing criticism to:

1. Not worry too much about negative comments about my work
2. Place little importance on negative comments from those who don’t know me
3. Place even less importance on anonymous negative comments, which is effectively what these on Metafilter are

Having said that I find it interesting that the humour not being ‘edgy’ enough seems to be the recurring criticism. Interesting, as I personally find most humour described as ‘edgy’ a lot less funny than more subtle humour. And humour that is trying too hard to ‘say something’ is often the worst.

I know I need to carry on doing what I do without letting what people say affect me. But I would be interested to know from some of the regular commenters which of my cartoons they find the funniest. For instance, do you like the ones where I am trying to make some sort of point, or those where I am drawing something amusing because it is an amusing picture and for no other reason? Do you like my entirely inoffensive pictures or prefer those times when I have been a bit grumpy and done a drawing to ease my fury? I’m happy to hear which kinds you find less funny too – I really won’t be offended.

As I need to fill up some blog posts while I am away during August I may well post some of the cartoons you say you like along with a link to the blog of the person who made the suggestion. Feel free to suggest cartoons in the comments or via e-mail.

Posted by Dave at 2:18 pm on July 17, 2006 and filed under Cartooning.

33 Comments

I am about to move house and then get married, so greetings cards will not be available over the summer months. If you’d like to order any of my cartoon cards then now is the last time you’ll be able to do so before September. If you could send me an e-mail to let me know what you’ll be ordering (if you are sending a cheque for instance) that would be really helpful. I’ll probably be taking the greetings card ordering facilities offline around Wednesday or so, so if you could place any orders you might have today or tomorrow that would be great. Thank you!

Posted by Dave at 11:19 am on July 17, 2006 and filed under CartoonChurch progress.

4 Comments

The weekend has been terribly busy so I haven’t been able to blog until now, 10pm on Sunday, an almost unheard-of occurrence. This is a brief account of what we did. It’s OK, but not that interesting.

Yesterday we went to Cheltenham for a party. There were lots of musicians and spies there. Really. GCHQ is based in Cheltenham. I kept on feeling that people were watching me from behind trees and things but then that’s something I should go and see someone about rather than anything to do with Cheltenham. We did lots of driving but it was well worth the trip.

This morning we went to a very large church in Cheltenham. They sing lots of songs, have very comfy seats and we were made to feel very welcome. There again I might struggle to go there regularly as they don’t do any processing up and down the aisles in funny vestments. I love processing in funny vestments. I suppose there are more important things in church than processing in funny vestments, but it’s still pretty important.

This evening, having done some furniture moving we watched Top Gear. It’s rather fun, though it has rather turned into a platform for Jeremy Clarkson to air his views rather than anything much to do with cars. In tonight’s programme they went caravanning, which was quite amusing as they made everything they could possibly think of go wrong so as to make caravanning look really unfun. But it was so blatantly staged (crashed caravan into various things before eventually burning it down) that it made them look ever so slightly silly. The good name of caravanning, campervanning and camping in general was, I think, upheld.

Talking of which, this week I must decide the final fate of my campervan. I need to find someone to come and tow it (at a cost), mend it, MOT it and then I will need to tax and insure it and even then I will have nowhere to store it. Telephoning a scrapyard is beginning to look like the least costly option, though that would make me very sad.

Posted by Dave at 10:04 pm on July 16, 2006 and filed under Campervans, Mundane.

2 Comments

Posted by Dave at 8:00 am on July 15, 2006 and filed under Cartoons.

5 Comments

Welcome to visitors from Metafilter who have been popping in to see the cartoons today. Apologies if the site is down for much of the day as a result. Don’t blame yourselves – the site is hosted on a machine constructed from dried grass and tissue paper and crashes if someone even looks at it in a stern sort of a way.

Posted by Dave at 5:26 pm on July 14, 2006 and filed under CartoonChurch progress.

4 Comments

[Click on the image to see it in a larger way]

Message to Martin Jones, formerly of Essex
We have been getting your post for the last two years. If you happen to be a Cartoon Blog reader I would highly appreciate you taking steps to rectify this. I have to admit that we are a little bit grumpy about all the post we still get for you, but as a forgetful man myself who still has post going to about 15 former residences I am, on this occasion going to spare you the full force of my wrath. Another time tell people you’re moving, there’s a good fellow.

Message to the Vodaphone* telecommunications company
We have returned the envelopes with Martin Jones’ name on them every single month for the last two years. Your company is quite clearly entirely incompetent, having no mechanism for the removal of names and addresses from your database. This being the case it is becoming clear that we are going to have to dispose of these letters ourselves for the rest of our lives. The next letter you send will be returned with an invoice covering the cost of this monthly disposal. In addition I am going to recommend to my readers that they refrain from using their Vodaphone* telephones until you sort out this almighty shambles.

*Yes, I know, this is a misspelling. But I’m not going to get a high Google ranking for ‘Vodafone’, whereas with the misspelling I just might. In any case they jolly well ought to learn to spell. Vodafone indeed. Pah.

Posted by Dave at 11:46 am on July 14, 2006 and filed under Letters, Slightly grumpy.

9 Comments

This is a sample from my Guide to Greenbelt booklet from last year – you can see the whole thing online here. I love Greenbelt for lots of reasons, one of the main ones being that I get to see lots of nice people. We have an annual gathering for the Wibsite bloggers (last year’s photos) which is one of the highlights.

So, who is going to the Greenbelt Festival 2006? If you’re going and might like to meet up then leave a comment below and we’ll take things from there – we could swap mobile texting numbers or something. If you are going but would like to avoid meeting up at all costs that’s ok too – write a comment telling us all about it.

Posted by Dave at 8:44 am on July 13, 2006 and filed under Festivals and Exhibitions, Greenbelt.

18 Comments

Posted by Dave at 8:14 am on July 13, 2006 and filed under Cartoons.

4 Comments

As I suspect you will have noticed the site has been down a lot over the last few days and it has been making me unhappy. In fact if you’ve been following this site from the beginning you will have noticed that it has been down a lot over the whole time it has existed. Usually no more than an hour or two at a time, but there have been a lot of these times. Looking through my ‘sent e-mails’ I note that I have contacted my web hosts Purple Paw Internet over 20 times this year to say that the site and e-mail are down. And that is just the number of times it has happened when I have been online. Who knows how many other times there have been.

The company can’t give me any assurance that things will get better, but unfortunately my expectations as far as customer service goes are very low, so up to this point I’ve done nothing about it. I need to change web hosts, but it’s all stress, time and money. I also have no-one on hand to help me out if it all goes horribly wrong which I think is the real reason I am hesitant to go ahead, but it’s looking like I now need to.

So, in the meantime I’m really really sorry. I hope things will get better but I can offer no assurances.

I’ll try to come back with more of the usual cheery nonsense tomorrow.

Posted by Dave at 10:58 pm on July 12, 2006 and filed under CartoonChurch progress.

6 Comments