Santa's little helper

Christmas is upon us and in news rooms up and down the country, the search is on for stories with festive cheer.

This week, The Westmorland Gazette presented me with the tale of a reindeer. One which had escaped from a local garden centre, where it was giving rides to gnomes (or something).

My first sketch (see below) caused consternation in the news room. The last time the Gazette hinted that Santa MIGHT NOT EXIST, it unleashed a flood of letters from angry readers, e.g.: “How dare you upset my little Timmy, who I had vowed to keep in ignorance of the truth until he was 37.” 

Now, I'm all in favour of telling the nation’s young that their parents are peddling a big fat lie. It’s good preparation for when they find out there’s an even bigger whopper being put about. 

However, I was overruled. * In any case, of course he exists - the U.S. Military tracks him every year via radar.

Elsewhere in the news, protestors are getting their veins in a knot about Cumbria being used as a dump for nuclear waste. Campaigners lit a candle on the stump of Brockhole’s ex-monkey puzzle tree for unspecified, possibly magical, reasons. (They don't seem to have noticed that we've been dumping nuclear waste in the area since the 1950s.)

And finally, someone put a cat in a wheelie bin. Possibly a copy-cat incident.

Here are my cartoon sketches. Which would you choose to grace the front page? Let me know in the comments box below. You can find out if you were right on Thursday by visiting my website.

* Wait till they see next week’s Gazette investigation: WHAT REALLY LURKS AT THE BOTTOM OF YOUR GARDEN: THE GREAT FAIRY MYTH!

Sleighed

Christmas comes but once a year and so does the seasonal opportunity for a colour cartoon on the front page of The Westmorland Gazette.

It’s become a tradition and it’s always easier to achieve when there are some seasonal stories to match. This year we managed ghosts and parking.

Levens Hall has a ghost, along with many other historic houses. This one is the spirit of a spurned traveller who issued a curse, claiming a male heir would only be born when the River Leven freezes over. (Hence the third cartoon - yes, technically inaccurate but you get the idea).

The festive parking story was South Lakeland’s bright idea to make residents pay for residential parking permits. You’d think they could generate enough income from their enterprising new drugs farm in the public loos. 

Here are the sketches I pitched to the editor. A scruffy bunch but drawn in 2B pencil with little eye for style; some of us have a dealine, you know. The final artwork was a composite in order to arrange all the elements into the 2cms square space I get these days. Just for a change, I’ve shown a couple of the sketches for the final artwork, along with the finished cartoon, as it appears in the Gazette. It also features over on my website.

“Ignore him, it’s just another tax reminder from the Inland Revenue.”

“Oh no, it’s the ghost of Christmas Future!”

“It’s freezing out. Do you fancy an early night?”

“Have you got a £25 resident’s permit for that?”

A couple of early sketches for the final artwork: