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.

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.

Drawing and watching TV and drawing

It's beneficial and fun to just do rough sketches of heads and faces while watching TV, of people you see. Here are a bunch of them from my sketchbooks.

No, that last one isn't me. Wipe that smirk off your face!

The first time I wore a face mask in public was in Vietnam in 2018. The pollution in Ho Chi Minh City was pretty bad, so I bought some from a convenience store. I felt kinda stupid wearing it, but once I was in the street I realized no one cared. Then a year and a half later the pandemic meant we were all wearing them anyway. Funny how life turns out, in'nit?  

Pictures of me, pictures of you

A while ago someone asked me why there are no photos of me on this blog (there actually are, but you'll have to hunt around to find them). This is an art blog, anyway – so how about some drawings of me? There aren't that many in my archives, but here are some for you to look at. It's always interesting how someone else renders you in artistic form – regardless of their artistic ability!

This one was by Mladen, an accomplished illustrator. He drew it in 2014 at either the first or second monthly comics meetup in Melbourne that I attended. If I remember right, although he was sitting opposite me, he had a basketball player in mind when drawing this! He drew it in ink on textured watercolour paper and was kind enough to give me the drawing when he was finished.

A Japanese girl called Miho drew this one, in 2002. While living and teaching in Japan, as someone of a different culture I was probably drawn a bit differently than the way Japanese high school students usually drew their friends and other people. In this case, with a purposeful stride, schoolbooks under my arm, shoujo manga-esque eyes, and noodle arms and legs! That's me all right.

Another one drawn by a Japanese student, a girl named Mami. Like Miho's drawing above, it was drawn in the corner of a bit of schoolwork. I wonder if these girls drew little caricatures of the other teachers who'd be marking their work?

This was drawn by my 4 year old niece, Aanya. It's a drawing of her, her mum/my sister, and me. You might think the big person in the middle is me, right? Wrong. I am reliably informed that the smallest person, the one on the right with a single long strand of hair, is in fact me. Like most young kids learning to draw faces and bodies, Aanya is used to giving hair to every head. Perhaps she felt sorry for me so she gave me a single long strand instead.

It's another drawing of me looking vaguely dissatisfied (my default expression, it seems), done by Daniel, an attendee of the monthly PCAF comics workshops in Perth, in 2024. As you can see he used magenta and yellow graphic markers to do it and he told me that those are not 'stink lines' above my head, but frustration or worry lines. I tend to make the same facial expression as the character I'm drawing so I can only assume I was drawing a worried face at the time.

Back in 2008 another guy called Daniel did this drawing in Illustrator, depicting him, me, and two of our graphic design classmates, based on Jeremy Plumb's cover of Blur's best-of album, called, oddly enough, Blur: The Best Of. This image looks dodgy because it's a scan of a printout – I don't have the source file for this one.

See that yellow face? According to my cousin Gabby, that's supposed to be me. She drew this when she was 7, and is now 31 (and probably still draws like this). Okay, maybe not.

Another drawing done by one of my students in Japan many years ago, named Ikki. That's him looking in from the right. I'm the one at the bottom left, and I have to say, even though he nailed the caricatures of his mates Shingo and Takahira-kun, he's depicted me in a rather unusual way, complete with blonde hair. I was actually thinking of making this my online profile picture! But that would be silly.

Erica

 
Erica is a character in my graphic novel series, Airbury Academy (2007-2018). She first appeared in 2001 as an extremely minor background character, with only one line of dialogue, in a sci-fi/comedy comic called Metalheads that I drew when I was a uni student. There were eight issues made between 1998 and 2003. The bulk of the Airbury characters all first appeared in Metalheads, as did the character Miss Fox from Juliet Prime.

When Erica next appeared, in the original (online) version of Airbury Academy Volume I in 2007, she had been promoted to main character Psyche's best friend. This was a decision taken by my friend Sue (RIP), who had a hand in writing a couple of stories in it. Sue's justification was that her childhood friend was named Erica and she liked my character design. Well, why not?

Erica appeared throughout the entire series. She had a cameo at the end of Limelight in 2021, and is set to appear (along with about 75% of the Airbury characters) in a new murder-mystery graphic novel later this decade. So look out for it! Until then, enjoy some panels...