This is the first new ‘cartoon’ (if you can call it that) I’ve posted here for several years.

I have made some progress and I thought I would report back to any interested parties who have not given up on me as a lost cause.

The pages for the 2009 calendar are now in. That is what I have spent way too much of the last three months doing. I just have some bits to do for the cover. The cartoons for book number 2 have also been sent off - there are just bits and bobs to be done like the deciding on the order that the cartoons will be in. I have also done some cartoons for another book that will be coming out in the summer - I think five plus the cover artwork are done and two aren’t.

I am starting another smaller freelance job this week, but all in all the pressure should soon start to ease a bit, which should mean that I’ll be able to get back to adding some decent content to this site and a lot of other jobs that I have been badly neglecting. Thanks for still reading even though the service has been a bit variable.

Posted by Dave at 2:34 pm on April 14, 2008 and filed under Cartoons, CartoonChurch progress.

10 Comments

A word about comments on this site.

I appreciate the comments that are posted here, I really do. I’d like this to be a place where there is room for debate and even disagreement. However, there are a few things I need to say.

First of all, rules. These need to be posted somewhere more clearly really, but for now, they’re here.

I don’t allow comments which:

1. Attack another individual
2. Are posted with the main aim of advertising the poster’s website
3. Contain allegations that can’t be backed up
4. Contain language I’d prefer not to see on my site
5. Are comments which the poster wouldn’t make to someone else’s face
6. Are a load of nonsense

I reserve the right to disallow or edit comments for any of these reasons or for any other reason that might not fall into these categories. This list is incomplete, I’m sure. I aim to be fair. I will allow, for instance, comments that criticise me.

I’m aware that sometimes my moderation is inadequate. Things get through that shouldn’t. This has been especially true in the last few months. I’m working morning, afternoon and evening for rather too many days a week trying to get various projects finished, and so moderating the comments here hasn’t been a priority. I’m not trying to gain sympathy votes here - the fact I have too much to do is my own fault for reasons that are too complicated to explain.

Apologies if I’ve let things through that break my own rules and that have been aimed at you as an individual. If there’s something I’ve missed I’m happy to be contacted so I can take appropriate action.

Pseudonyms. I allow them, though I would request that you stick to one username. In fact from now on I’d like to make this a rule. Contact me if you need clarification about this. There are blog sites that insist you register or use your real name. I’ve thought about these options, but for now the site stays as it is. Please don’t think though that because you use a pseudonym no-on will know who you are. It’s difficult to stay anonymous on the internet for any extended period of time - trust me.

E-mail addresses - these need to be genuine. Sometimes I e-mail the address to see whether they are.

I realise that some of the people who post here are passionate about the subject you’re talking about. Angry sometimes. I understand that and try to make allowances for it.

Occasionally people have been unhappy that I’ve refused to post their comments for one of the reasons I’ve mentioned. If so my advice would be to start your own blog. In fact, why not start one anyway. It really is easy these days - I’d choose wordpress.com for a free site that looks good. (The new Wibsite.com is coming soon, at which point I’ll be recommending that.) See also my post from last year: How to make a website for your church with a minimal amount of effort.

So in summary: please try to abide by the rules. Thank you for reading.

Posted by Dave at 11:05 pm on April 1, 2008 and filed under Sundry posts, CartoonChurch progress.

12 Comments

This drawing was lying around so I thought I’d post it.

Disclaimers: (a) I know it is supposed to be ‘while’, not ‘when’. (b) The person is a generic person, not me. (3) He hasn’t got two thumbs - that’s just the way the light is shining on your screen.

Life here in the ’studio’ continues to be a bit frantic, hence the lack of new pictures of this sort on the blog. I’m doing lots of cartoons, but they are for use elsewhere. The next month will unfortunately continue to be this way, but from the middle of April there should start to be a bit more variety here on the blog. Thanks for your patience.

Posted by Dave at 8:55 am on March 19, 2008 and filed under Cartoons, CartoonChurch progress, Religion.

6 Comments

At long last I am ready to make an announcement that has been waiting in my ‘pending announcements’ box (usually a very empty box it must be said) for some months. I am now blogging on a new blog, the Church Times blog, of which this is a sample screen shot:

The new blog will be about the same sorts of subjects that you’ll find in the Church Times newspaper - religious news with an emphasis on Anglican goings-on. There will be plenty of cartoons, both new ones and some unearthed from my filing ’system’. The aim is to bring some more variety to the Church Times site and hopefully reach a wider audience.

I know that the starting of a new blog will raise some questions, so I will attempt to preempt them. First of all, this Cartoon blog and the CartoonChurch website will continue as will my cartoons in the Church Times newspaper.

So, how will the ‘two blog’ scenario will work? Well, the Church Times blog will contain:

• My blog posts on religious topics
• My cartoons on religious topics

This blog will contain everything else. In other words:

• CartoonChurch.com cartoons and updates
• My cartoons on non-religious topics, including ‘We blog cartoons’ updates
• Blog posts about things like my books, talks, personal and inconsequential matters, things I’ve seen out of the window etc
• Posts about the former SPCK bookshops situation

Whilst the Cartoon blog will continue I will no longer advertise it as my daily internet column. CartoonChurch.com will contine and I will keep on adding new cartoons to the ‘content’ pages.

The Church Times blog site is new and it has only been live since Friday. I didn’t mention it here at the weekend as I’ve been away and wanted to be able to moderate any comments that might be posted and respond to any questions that might be asked. Please excuse any technical glitches that we haven’t yet ironed out.

You may well be wondering how I will find the time to post on yet another website. Well, I will be posting a bit less here, but I’m also going to be cutting down the amount of freelance work that I do as that is the part of my work I sometimes struggle with. Although I still have a lot to do in the next couple of weeks after that time I am going to (politely) say ‘no’ to a lot of projects for the sake of my sanity. I’m also hoping to find some people to be a bit more involved in the running of the Wibsite, the community website that I supposedly run but have, to my shame, rather neglected recently. Chris has had to do more than he should, which hasn’t been right.

I hope you’ll enjoy the new blog - I for one am very excited to be doing it. I’m also looking forward to working more with the people from the Church Times - the plan is for me to go into their offices in the City of London for one day a week as well as doing cartooning and blogging at home as I usually do.

There is a feed that you can subscribe to if you enjoy what I do. You can read the blog through a site like Bloglines, Google reader, My Yahoo etc, or you can get it delivered by e-mail as I know some people do with this site. The feed page should have the full information about that sort of thing.

Hope to see you there - and here.

Posted by Dave at 6:35 pm on March 3, 2008 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, Blogging, CartoonChurch.com newsletter, Religion.

9 Comments

This cartoon can be freely re-used on your blog - to find more of its kind see We Blog Cartoons.

I’m aware that this blog is not very good value at the moment. I can explain everything though - I have a major deadline this week and am also involved in a new project being launched in the very near future.

In the meantime please excuse my slap dash attitude: unanswered e-mails, blog posts with no titles, cartoons I’ve already posted six times, that sort of thing. Thanks for your patience.

Posted by Dave at 9:50 am on February 26, 2008 and filed under Cartoons, CartoonChurch progress.

5 Comments

Before Christmas I said that I had one or two announcements to make. Well, here is one of them.

The Anglican Communion Office have invited me to take on the role of ‘Cartoonist in residence’ at the forthcoming Lambeth Conference and I have said ‘yes’. My role will be to draw events at the conference as they develop. These drawings will then be displayed by various means including the internet. I will have a visible presence (unlike my usual non-visible sort) around the conference campus and will get to go to some of the meetings. We haven’t decided upon all of the details of all of these things yet.

Some background information: The Lambeth Conference happens every ten years, and about 800 bishops are invited. The 2008 conference is from the 16th July to the 4th August 2008 at the University of Kent in Canterbury, although the various bishops will be in the UK by at least the 10th of July when the ‘hospitality’ part starts. This is when different English, Scottish or Welsh dioceses host the delegates and, one imagines, provide them with sandwiches. There is then a retreat at Canterbury Cathedral before the programme on the University campus begins. The Spouses’ Conference runs alongside the one for Bishops and is for spouses.

I am very excited by this prospect. I am most definitely pro-Lambeth and pro-Archbishop-Rowan, and so it is a great privilege to be asked to be involved. I will be practicing my drawing between now and then and may even get some new pens. It is certainly a rather daunting prospect, but hopefully I’ll be OK. A planned new easel will be a help.

As you’ll remember I made a comment back in September about the ‘Marketplace’ at the conference and how brilliant it would be to have a stall. Well, I am pleased to say that I will indeed have a stall, though I will be asking other people to run it most of the time. I am fortunate in having one or two people who have agreed to help me, though I may need to recruit one or two more. I have not decided exactly what the stall it will have on it yet. One or two books perhaps. I may set aside a little colouring table for bishops and others to use between meetings.

I will of course have more to say about this over the coming months. Such posts will be gathered together here on the blog in a specially convened ‘Lambeth 08‘ category. Something will probably be said officially by the Lambeth organisers at some point, but in the meantime I am free to talk about it.

Additional information for visitors

These are some of the other Anglican events that I have done drawings about:

• The Windsor Report
• The Anglican Consultative Council
• The Primates Meeting

Also, for people who have surfed in, perhaps via the internet: The pages with my blog posts and cartoons about Anglican goings-on might be of interest, as my pages of church-related cartoons.

Posted by Dave at 2:17 pm on January 14, 2008 and filed under Cartoons, CartoonChurch progress, Cartooning, Anglican goings-on, Religion, Lambeth 08.

48 Comments

This is my final post of 2007 unless something unexpected happens. I have no plans for this to be the case. I am about to take a bit of a break. All being well I will post again on this blog on the 1st of January 2008. During the intervening time comments may be moderated, and it might take me a while to get around to doing the moderating owing to pre-planned slackness.

2007 has been a good year I think, generally for me and here on the blog. I think this year has been the first when I’ve really been able to see how this cartooning lark could possibly work in the longer run. Glancing through my list of posts I also note that in 2007:

• I did a ‘cartoon talks’ (without a telescopic pointy-thing) in places like Wokingham and at the Portsmouth Diocesan Conference. I’m still hoping to do more of these. I’ve spoken to one or two of you about some of these - we’ll have to finalise some dates in the New Year.
• The Primates had a meeting and I did a drawing. I have perhaps gone a bit quiet on the Anglican goings-on front in recent months, but expect a few more Anglican drawings in 2008.
• The SPCK bookshop saga continued to develop and this blog unexpectedly became a place for interested parties to find information.
• We got cats.
• My first properly produced calendar was produced, meaning that my annual last minute dash to find a photocopier during the week before Christmas was avoided. Thanks to everyone who has supported my work by buying it.
• Vegetable racks became a surprise topic of interest.
• Mrs W and I went to the Christian Blog and Web Awards
• I posted this cartoon (shown below) on the 17th of January. It was, I think, the most ‘re-posted on blogs’ cartoon of the year on my We Blog Cartoons site.

2008 is set to be an exciting year. There are set to be some changes afoot career-wise about which I hope to say more in the New Year. Don’t worry though, I’m not stopping my Church Times cartoons and this site will still be here.

One of my initial challenges during January and February will be to draw the cartoons for a 2009 calendar and to finish the cartoons for a second book. This is quite daunting as I generally struggle for one funny idea a week, whereas I will need to have 5 or 6 a week during this time. This being the case it is likely that I will (if everyone is in agreement of course) be devoting many, if not most, of my posts on this blog to discussion of various church-related topics that will hopefully provide me with my ideas. It might, of course, be unethical to pinch all ones ideas from the internet public, in which case I will go back to sitting up all night staring miserably at a wall. When I’ve done this before it has been quite fun, so hopefully it won’t be too bad an experience for everyone involved.

Finally, a very Happy Christmas to everyone who reads this site, comments on this site, or both. Thanks for all your involvement. See you in 2008.

Posted by Dave at 8:55 pm on December 22, 2007 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, In-depth analysis, Cartooning, Religion.

21 Comments

This is not that interesting, but then it is Friday and none of you are reading anyway. Happy Thanksgiving, by the way, to readers from the USA.

Blog comments. As I mentioned the other day I’ve been having some problems knowing what to allow and what not to allow on the SPCK threads. There is much righteous anger which I’d like to allow, but on the other hand I don’t want to get into trouble. I’m still in the process of writing a clearer comment policy which should make the boundaries a bit clearer.

The other issue I face at the moment is comment spam. Lots and lots and lots of it. A few months ago I put some miraculous measures into place which halved the amount of spam I get overnight. I can’t tell you what those were in case the spammers are reading. Unfortunately the situation with spam has, over the last 10 days in particular got significantly worse. I’d say I now average well over one spam comment a minute - at times it is about 100 an hour. I’ve always accepted that wasting hours scrolling through spam is just a part of writing a blog you have to live with, but the amount of time it takes to go through them all is beginning to get ridiculous. I have reactivated the ‘Akismet’ anti spam device, which does a very good job of not letting very much spam though at all. The problem with it is that I have found that it marks a reasonable number of legitimate comments as spam too, meaning that you still have to go through all of the spam comments. I’m not alone in this unfortunately.

As I see it there are 3 options for the Cartoon Blog comments:

1. Allow comments as they are, but we must all accept that the Akismet device will eat about 5-10% of them, so those ones will never see the light of day
2. Make everyone fill in one of those CAPTCHA things - in other words a series of numbers or letters that you, the commenter, have to type in.
3. Give you the option to register, so that if you are logged in you can be sure your comment will get through. I know some people don’t like having to register for more and more things, so I’d still like to make it optional if I go this route.

Any thoughts welcomed. Which option do you find best on your blog? (As a side issue I’d also be interested to know whether certain blog platforms perform better then others when it comes to comment spam. Do you Blogger / Typepad / Movable Type users find that your anti-comment-spam measures work for you?)

Meanwhile other bloggers in the UK Christian sort of world are debating whether to have comments at all. Adrian Warnock has done away with comments, owing to the amount of time it takes to moderate them. Peter Kirk sees this as a refusal to be accountable, and a debate has sprung forth in his comment section and also at Methodist Dave Warnock’s blog. Dave is an unrelated Warnock, in case you were wondering. See also Dave’s post ‘Do blog comments work?‘.

All in all a bit of a kerfuffle, but there are some interesting points being made for those who are interested in such things.

In the meantime if any comments posted here don’t appear after 12 hours or so send me an e-mail and I’ll try to fish them out of the fiery comment furnace.

Posted by Dave at 10:19 am on November 23, 2007 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, Mundane, Technical.

33 Comments

This 2 minute diagram is meant to represent a person, possibly me, stepping away from his keyboard and drawings. I am taking a break for a number of days and don’t expect to be back on this weblog until next Thursday. In the meantime comments may not be moderated, so any comments made may not appear for some time unless the system decides to favour you for reasons of its own choosing.

The last few weeks have been rather interesting ones for me workwise. It is an exciting time, but unfortunately I can’t explain why at the moment. There is a lot to be pondered, and so I find myself doing a lot of pacing up, forth, back and down. This is why I need a break and some new shoes.

See you soon.

Posted by Dave at 2:43 pm on October 19, 2007 and filed under Cartoons, CartoonChurch progress.

5 Comments

Today has not been an entirely good day, not least because I have had problems with Paypal, the system I use to collect payments on this website.

All of a sudden Paypal has started to charge postage on every single order, even if it is a licence which will not be posted as I do not post the licences. The code on my website has not changed, so it is a problem at their end. I have spent hours phoning them and messing around with the code for the payment buttons, but all to no avail. There does not seem to be any way to resolve the problem.

It would be a nuisance if I have to stop using Paypal because of this, as I cannot afford another credit card system, which would mean I cannot take payments.

In the meantime apologies to everyone who has paid me today for the extra postage charge you have been forced to pay. I will be in touch shortly to offer you a refund.

Posted by Dave at 11:59 pm on August 31, 2007 and filed under CartoonChurch progress.

8 Comments

As hinted at the other day the The Dave Walker Guide to the Church 2008 Calendar is now available.

It is published by Canterbury Press, costs £5.99 and is subtitled ‘Things to do in your church’. Each month contains a page of different drawings of events that one might (perhaps) choose to celebrate in one’s church during that month. All the material is brand new and hasn’t been published anywhere else, except for December which is a Christmas cartoon I did as a half page Church Times one that I was quite pleased with. The calendar artwork pages look a bit like the one to the right, but bigger. The calendar ‘dates’ pages have plenty of space to write things in and contain important ecclesiastical events. Each copy of the calendar comes with a strong envelope to put it in.

The calendar is available from the following places:

• Direct from SCM-Canterbury Press
• From the Church House Bookshop - the actual shop or online. They are doing a special offer - book and calendar for £8.99 until 1st October
• From the Church Times tent at Greenbelt*
• SPCK (Currently unavailable from SPCK)
• Through Anglicanshop.com (Already in their ‘Top 10′ apparently)
• If you quote the ISBN number 978-1-85311-815-9 I think you should be able to order it through other bookshops*

*I’m fairly sure about these options, but will confirm them as soon as I can. If you know of other places stocking it please let me know.

Posted by Dave at 11:00 pm on August 9, 2007 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, CartoonChurch.com newsletter, Books, Religion.

6 Comments

I will post the details tomorrow.

Posted by Dave at 11:28 pm on August 7, 2007 and filed under CartoonChurch progress.

9 Comments