Not only do you get a new comic, or comics pages, from my self published Castle Comics every Friday, but now I am going to be giving you a new feature for Mondays.
Laugh Lines is a homage to the newspaper gag cartoons of my youth. Newspapers like the Sun, the Daily & Sunday Mirror, the People and the News of the World all used to carry their spot gag cartoons in this format; I and many other readers used to love them as they show-cased some of the best cartoons from the greatest gag cartoonists of the day.
These guys would sit in their converted sheds, front rooms, spare bedrooms and at the kitchen table just writing and drawing these cartoons, then once a week they would take a trip up to London and show all the editors their weeks work. The editor would chose what he wanted and the cartoonist would take his chit down to accounts and get paid in cash, then it was on to the next newspaper.
Once the day was over, the cartoonists would meet at one of Fleet Streets famous watering holes and get blind drunk; take the last train home, collapse into bed, wake up the next morning and the process would start all over again.
Sadly the big papers no longer run that many cartoons in the UK, and gag cartoons---at the levels they once were---are sadly a thing of the past.
That was until now.
Starting next Monday 24 August I will be posting one of these Laugh Lines columns every week and continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I will also be bombarding local weekly newspapers with samples and re-directing them to this site. So if you would like to see my Laugh Lines in your local paper, please let your editor know; make he or she aware of what I'm doing and urge them to take a look. A readers wishes to see something new in their paper is still one of the best ways to get that paper to run a new idea or feature.
But until then, have fun with this sample. The next ones will be posted a lot bigger.
Cheers
Karl