Hello everyone. Happy Christmas! (I had planned to post this before now, but was prevented from doing so by a glitch – see diagram above, which has little to do with to do with the topic of this post, but it is one of my favourites from the year which I don’t think I’ve made public anywhere.)

Anyway, this is my end of year blog post, which I have a tradition of doing (I did one last year).

2008, brief review of

• It hasn’t really been a very good year on this blog, has it? Looking back at my list of blog posts show that things have declined somewhat.
• In February I started to write the Church Times blog, which has meant that I’ve had less time to devote to this one, but this site has, if truth be told, suffered rather more than I had intended.
• I will remember 2008 as the year of the Lambeth Conference. I was immensely privileged to be asked to be part of it doing my drawings in my medium-sized tent. I still have, if the truth be told, not really recovered.
• Canterbury Press very kindly published My Pew: Things I have seen from it in the summer. Other projects during the year included cartoons for the What am I doing here? book, the Autism and Asperger syndrome guidelines for churches and the Youthwork cartoon series which I hope will be fully revealed shortly.

2009, plans for

• I intend to spend most of January worrying about my tax return.
• The end of February is my deadline for the 2010 Dave Walker Guide to the Church Calendar, so if last year is anything to go by the month will be spent looking out of the window trying to think of ideas for it. (Aside: This years is still available).
• In April we’re going back to Spring Harvest… I know, who would have thought it? Purely as an in-depth reporter you understand, not because I’m turning Evangelical on a closet basis.
• 2009 might turn out to be the year of cartoon canvasses, new greetings cards and the sorting out of shambleses. We shall see. (I’m fully aware that ‘shambleses’ isn’t valid English in most places by the way, but here in my computing office it is a well-understood and appropriate term).
• I’ve no other plans as yet. I think the Bible advises not to make too many. We live in uncertain times, so who knows what will happen, but if I have one resolution it is to try and enjoy myself a bit more doing what I am so fortunate to be doing rather than being so continually anxious about it all.

All best wishes to everyone reading – Happy New Year.

(Posted this time last year, but I doubt anyone will have really noticed.)

Posted by Dave at 6:54 pm on December 31, 2008 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, CartoonChurch.com newsletter, Sent via mobile telephone.

6 Comments

Hello.

As you may or may not have noticed this blog has been silent for around 44 days. Giving an account of the causes would risk a drift into the realms of the tiresome, but in summary I’ve been a bit under the weather for one reason or another. I have been keeping my paid commitments going, but some other things have been allowed to drift somewhat.

Thank you for a number of kind messages expressing good sentiments of various sorts.

Anyway, I fully intend to start this blog going again. I’m not putting any pressure on myself to do it daily, but hopefully there will be new things a number of times a week. This blog may well go back to being the place where I post any old nonsense, which in the past has tended to produce the best results.

(New cartoon from my We Blog Cartoons site, where you’ll find some of my cartoons that can be freely re-used on blogs.)

Posted by Dave at 7:54 pm on November 23, 2008 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, CartoonChurch.com newsletter, Cartoons, New Weblogcartoons cartoons.

20 Comments

After 5 days CartoonChurch and the Cartoon Blog are back online, although some turbulence may continue. The problem was caused by a fire at the data centre where the site is hosted which meant that all of the electricity had to be turned off. For some reason it took a long time to turn it on and make the servers work again – my web host’s support page will, I am assured, explain things shortly.

As some of you discovered I ran a backup site with a few high resolution cartoons for subscribers whilst this site was down, but letting people know about it proved difficult. The backup site will remain online at http://cartoonchurch.wordpress.com/ in case there are any problems today or indeed at any time in the future.

Many apologies for the inconvenience and confusion that this all will have caused. I know that many e-mails sent to me bounced – I’m hoping none have been lost, but I don’t know that for sure. E-mail is trickling into my CartoonChurch address again now, but it might be safer to send e-mail to dave at wibsite.com owing to the delays.

I’ll post one of the posts (about SPCK/SSG) that I posted on the backup site here on the Cartoon Blog shortly. Please forgive the duplication.

Posted by Dave at 9:34 am on June 6, 2008 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, CartoonChurch.com newsletter, Religion.

1 Comment

I’ve posted ten cartoons on CartoonChurch.com. They have all appeared somewhere else in the past, but they are newly available for subscribers and some of them have not been posted on the internet before. You can find links to all ten here, or I’ve posted individual links below:

The cartoons:

• The chain of command (From The Dave Walker Guide to the Church / originally published in the Church Times)
• Small children (From The Dave Walker Guide to the Church / originally published in the Church Times)
• The Vicar’s study (From The Dave Walker Guide to the Church / originally published in the Church Times)
• How to tell what is going on (From The Dave Walker Guide to the Church / originally published in the Church Times)
• The collection (From The Dave Walker Guide to the Church / originally published in the Church Times)
• How Christians can work together across the divide (Originally posted on this blog)
• The church is empty (Originally posted on the Church Times Blog)
• Asterisk (Originally posted on the Church Times Blog)
• How to be in two or three places (Originally posted on the Church Times Blog)
• Church meetings (posted on this blog, original version from the Baptist Union booklet Making a Splash)

Information about republishing these cartoons in church publications or elsewhere is in the usual place.

I’m aware that many of you are waiting to renew your church licence. Please do keep using the cartoons if that is the case – it is my fault not yours. Sorting out my renewals system is a major task which has needed doing for a very long time. I have to admit to struggling to keep up with doing both the creative side of things and the administration side of things, and this is the thing that has been left out. I am getting someone to help me set up an efficient way of doing the renewals and if all is well you should hear from me within the next month.

Posted by Dave at 5:31 pm on May 26, 2008 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, CartoonChurch.com newsletter, Cartoons, New CartoonChurch cartoons, Religion.

2 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 Blogging, CartoonChurch progress, CartoonChurch.com newsletter, Religion.

9 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 Books, CartoonChurch progress, CartoonChurch.com newsletter, Religion.

6 Comments

I am currently working on my calendar for 2008.

Those who know me will be perplexed by this, as usually I begin work on the calendar on around the 31st of December, or perhaps the 24th of December if I am giving copies as Christmas presents. However, I am pleased to be able to tell you that my calendar for 2008 is going to be published by Canterbury Press, the people who published my book and is going to be done properly unlike my usual ones. It will have entirely new drawings – none of it will have appeared on the internet and over 90% of it will not have appeared anywhere ever.

There is a small taster here on the Canterbury Press website.

The scheduled publication date is the 31st of May 2007 which Is around the same time as the Christian Resources Exhibition.

Posted by Dave at 10:15 am on March 12, 2007 and filed under Books, CartoonChurch progress, CartoonChurch.com newsletter.

17 Comments

This post is here for highly secret and yet deeply uninteresting testing purposes only and should be ignored.

I am not going to stop you commenting, but I must warn you that you will not find inner fulfilment by commenting on this post.

Equally I have never been one to discourage linking to this blog, but I must warn you that this post really does not merit a link and any readers clicking the link and arriving at this post will undoubtedly be disappointed.

Indeed, even by reading this post you are using valuable time which you could far more more usefully have spent elsewhere.

Move along now. Nothing to see.

Testing. One Two. One two one.

That should do it.

Update: There are no interesting developments to report on this topic.

Posted by Dave at 1:38 pm on May 22, 2006 and filed under CartoonChurch.com newsletter, Mundane.

8 Comments