Surrealism at the World Cup

Has it really been 16 years since I last posted about the FOOFA World Cup? Sixteen years to the day?? Well I never.

If you've been watching the 2026 World Cup you might have noticed the unusual design on Belgium's away jerseys:

What are those things? Well, surrealist art lovers may recognize them as the metallic orbs from René Magritte's painting from 1931, La voix des airs.

The Belgian team are paying tribute to their cultural heritage by honouring one of their finest artists. The shirt also features the words "Ceci n'est pas un maillot" ("This is not a jersey"), in reference to, y'know, that pipe thing. Those words were intended to be on the front of the shirt but that broke the rules or something, so they appear on the inside instead, on the collar.

It got me thinking. What if other countries wanted to pay tribute to their artists with a jersey design? What would that look like, eh? Wonder no more, because here are some I came up with.

SWITZERLAND: Hans Ruedi Giger

SPAIN: Salvador Dali

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Harvey Ball

FRANCE: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

ENGLAND: Banksy

THE NETHERLANDS: Piet Mondrian

What do you make of this, Bert?

Here's another old cartoon from many decades ago. It's not a bawdy postcard this time, just a single panel gag cartoon from 1937. I did find it rather puzzling though, but perhaps you can make some sense out of what's going on here:

At first glance, there's a lot of questions about this one. Where is this happening? What's behind the curtain? What job do these men have? Why is there light shining from their heads? Why does that one guy have such a perverse leer? Why have these people removed their shoes? Can someone explain any of this??

In the course of my 'research' I discovered that the most likely scenario is that these men are train conductors or porters, and that the setting here is a sleeper car on a train, although nothing in the artwork suggests this. (Unless the number '4' is meant to give it away?) That would explain the shoes. Oh, and one of the pairs is women's shoes, so there's something untoward going on here, Miss Marple.

The only visual element to this cartoon that I like is the dark-red ink wash for the curtain, although the use of red did make 'cinema ushers' or 'cops doing a brothel raid' a more likely scenario in my mind. Such is the suggestive power of a single colour. 

This cartoon is credited to Frank Beaven. He was one of several contributors to Laff-A-Day, a daily gag cartoon panel that ran in American newspapers from 1936 all the way up to 1998, if you can believe that. When King Features revived the series in 2006, its promo statement included this line: "Older readers may get an extra chuckle from scenes of traveling salesmen, two-ton Chevies and women sporting funny hats."

I mean if you don't get a chuckle out of those things you have no soul, yeah?

Until next time.

Stuff that didn't make it into Juliet Prime: Part I

Welcome, unsuspecting peasant, to...the Hall of Discarded Ideas! [cue evil laughter] Ah ha ha ha ha ha! 

Back in 2021, when I started working on plot ideas and concepts for my graphic novel Juliet Prime, I didn't have a clear idea of the events that were meant to happen in it. So I decided to make a list of every type of scene I wanted to see in a comic, and put it in. Most of the things on that list ended up in the finished book, but quite a lot didn't.

In the next few posts I will detail those rejected ideas here. Mostly because this is a web log — a time- and date-stamped record of my artistic doings. I also find that it helps to never fully discard your comic ideas. Just because these things didn't fit into my story doesn't mean they won't fit anywhere else. Hold on to them! They are probably more interesting than the slop being served up by 'Hollywood' these days, anyway.

Here's the first dropped idea that I wanted to make mention of.

 

Early on, I developed the conceit that the main characters Juliet and Seymour were time-travellers. I thought it would be interesting if, in this story set in the year 2112, that the protagonists were from another era. I thought this might go some way to explaining why their appearance isn't so 'futuristic'. Juliet is dressed like she's from the 1800s and Seymour has a striped rugby jersey redolent of a British public school boy. You could safely predict that no one will be dressing like this in the 22nd century and you'd be right.

A year after I first created these characters, there was a Blackadder special called Back & Forth. The Blackadder series was notable for showing iterations of the same characters in different eras, but in this one they actually travel through time, resulting in scenes like Blackadder going back to the reign of Elizabeth I and punching Shakespeare in the face. I could do that with my characters, couldn't I? Juliet goes back in time to meet the Roman emperor Diocletian and...? Some stuff happens?  

In the end though, I couldn't think of a way to make this idea fit in, and I didn't really want to write a time-travel story. Juliet and Seymour are not time-travellers, nor are they under the delusion that they are. They are just two kids in the future who dress like they're from the past.

~to be continued~ 

Froggie went a-courtin'

I'm more than two years late with this post — it was supposed to be posted back in October 2023! I found these pics when I was poking around my MacBook looking for things to delete, because my available hard drive space had dwindled down to a mere 1.1 GB. Incidentally that was also the entire hard drive capacity of my family's IBM Aptiva back in 1997!

But anyway — 

There were four progress photos of a small watercolour frog I painted. I can't remember what commentary was supposed to go with them, so I'll just post the pics.

First, the pencil outlines.

 

Then I filled in the background, everything except the frog's green body, the following day.

 

Just another view of it. It's A5 watercolour paper masking-taped to some porous cardboardy stuff that came as packing material.

 

And we're done! Looks like I wasn't happy with those vines in the background and blurred them out altogether. 

I painted this mainly to amuse my Japanese friend Meg who liked a drawing of a 'frog craftsman' I did earlier in 2023, and asked me to draw another frog. Hence this. And yes, that is a bowl of nachos in his hand. So, there you go! I hope you've enjoyed looking at this little critter as much as I have.

I say, shake it, madam! Capital "knockers"!

What ho, chaps! Fancy taking a trip back in time with me, to examine a 100 year old postcard? No? That's a bally awful idea, you say? Suggest such a thing again and I shall summon the police, you say? Well, too bad! Take a look at this.

This cartoon appeared on a postcard in the 1920s, depicting the end of gendered segregation on British beaches. The artists are credited only as 'AE & EW'. Note their deliberate choice in showing the lone female bather with a dejected expression while the male oiks look on making fatuous remarks. By Jove!

Those green structures the men are emerging from — clearly 'one at a time' didn't come into play back then — are not changing rooms. They were called bathing machines, and were pulled from the sand into shallow water (hence the wheels) so bathers could change into their bathing suits without being seen by the opposite sex. Bathing machines first appeared in the 1750s and were obsolete by the 1920s, but they were essential in those days of strict public bathing propriety. Well I never, Mavis. What will they think of next?

I am somewhat inclined to believe the two fully-dressed beachgoing fops on the extreme left are 'AE & EW' themselves (despite a total lack of evidence, but — gut instinct, right?). I think the one with the monocle is a bit more sinister, so I had a bash at drawing him.

It looks as though the identities of the erstwhile AE & EW have been lost to time, although there are many examples of their art to be found online. They were decidedly anti-feminist (big surprise) and you can see more here. In one of them, a man asks a suffragette "Don't you wish you were a man, Mrs. Spankhurst?" She replies "Yes, don't you wish you were?" 

Ah, the 1920s, where one could sally forth to take the seaside air of a morning in one's bow tie and boater, paired with cummerbund/coat and tails. What a time to be alive. Which I wasn't. Thankfully.