Lines of Work:Cartoon Time with Jeremy Banx.

There may have been many lines drawn, and many lines delivered, at the last Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub event of 2018 but there was certainly no line to get in. It was the most sparsely attended event I'd been to so far at The Star & Garter (was it the rain or, perhaps, did people have Christmas parties to attend?) and that seemed, initially, to put cartoonist Jeremy Banx a tiny bit off his stride.

It could just be that he took a while warming up but, either way, it was only a brief shame. Once Jeremy hit his groove it turned out to be a far more interesting evening than I'd expected, something that often happens with these Skeptics and Fortean events. It's why I keep going.

Banx is an award winning cartoonist who has contributed to Private Eye, the Wall Street Journal, Oink! (remember that?), The New Statesman, and, regularly these days, the Financial Times. He let it be known he's been trying to get a cartoon published in the highly respected New Yorker but so far he's been knocked back by that particular publication.

The talk started off with quite a lot of technical stuff, breaking down the cartoon making process to the nth degree, and even explaining how very obvious jokes work. Which kind of defeats the point of cartoons, surely? I thought I was in for a long evening and I remembered Rich Hall's dismissive critique of political cartoonists as well as my own childhood, when my personal festive cartoon preference was for Raccoons on Ice or Frosty the Snowman rather than witty comments about global warming or the minutiae of parliamentary deal making.

But I was being too harsh. Banx's undoubted enthusiasm and knowledge of the subject meant I warmed to him, and when he started showing us some actual examples of his cartoons - well, what do you know? They were pretty good. I even chuckled a couple of times. Others guffawed. We were just a titter and a chortle short of a Beano strip.

Of course we live in highly politically charged times and Banx, as he signs his work, has inevitably found fruitful source material in the twin disasters of Donald Trump and Brexit. Yet they act as a double edged sword, both being so incontestably ludicrous and laughable that it's quite difficult to actually lampoon them. Trump supporters and Brexiteers are so patently ridiculous that they provide an almost perfectly satirical running commentary of their own daft ideas nearly every time they open their mouths.

Also, things happen so quickly with them that, half the time, it's difficult to remember what was happening even fairly recently. So regular are the sackings and resignations these days that it can be tricky to recall who was in Trump's White House or May's cabinet just a few months ago? Remember the idea of a Brexit festival to celebrate what a great 'success' Brexit would be? I just about do. But you don't hear much about it anymore. Banx imagined the festival as a line of gullible voters waiting to ascend a helter skelter off a cliff edge. Excited perhaps by the ride but either wilfully ignorant of their destination and simply unbothered by it.

Other works need a caption and Banx suggested, and it was hard to disagree, that though non-captioned works tended to be stronger they were a lot more difficult do do. Or at least get right. Thus ended the 'to caption or not to caption' debate, yet there was quite a lot of talk about. How much detail to include? How many people? How much background? Did the lines need to be straight? Banx decided it was best to pare it right down and not to worry too much about accuracy. The key thing was in getting the message across as quickly as possible and, often, in a very small space.

As well as taking on the big stories of our time, Banx also picked out smaller ones, ones that may be particularly FT friendly, like the arrest and imprisonment of Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn for false accounting. Banx said it took him quite a while to twig that Nissan made motor vehicles and there was a small chance Ghosn could be taken to jail in one of his own machines. Whether or not Nissan made prison vans was neither here nor there, the point had been made.

Global warming, Canadian cannabis legislation, and the election of the extreme right wing Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil was all touched on. The latter, in a powerful image that showed Christ the Reedemer in Rio covering his eyes in horror, or shame, at what the Brazilian people had done. I couldn't help thinking it reminded me of something similar I saw showing the Statue of Liberty despairing following the election of Trump.

Plagiarism cropped up in the Q&A following the talk when Banx said, again I agreed, that it's not uncommon for similar cartoonists to come up with similar ideas and responses to the same news stories and it's only when it starts to happen repeatedly it becomes a concern.

Banx said that he, like almost everyone else, was getting bored of Brexit and Trump. Fuck, I'm bored of them seeping into every fucking blog I write, but I didn't fucking vote for them. The people who voted for either of these things who then have the audacity to complain that they hear too much about them really need a good hard look in the mirror. Assuming they have a reflection they may realise that if you vote to have something, don't keep fucking complaining that people mention that thing you wanted. For fuck's sake.

Banx's day seems to consist of a lot of Googling, a lot of reading news stories (possibly not great for his own mental health), and a lot of trying to find humour in often very serious subjects (America's horrendous gun death statistics, for example) which may help to alleviate the pain caused by being subjected to such regular accounts of misery and cruelty.

To lift his spirits he draws pictures of dogs sniffing each other's arseholes with wine tasting notes attached. The grim reaper too. He draws the grim reaper a lot. It kind of breaks up the ennui. He's even drawn a 'reaper' pulling a cracker with one of his trademark, big hootered, men off the street. Which was both topical and festive of him.

I came away thinking that Banx was an all round good egg. He may have laboured under the illusion that people in Brazil speak a language called Brazilian but that was more than balanced out by his hilarious description of attending a cricket match aged just four.

He'd been taken by his father who had neglected to explain the rules of cricket or, in fact, anything about the game. The toddler Banx observed a man reading a newspaper, another man fast asleep, and some other men in white running around (a tiny bit) on a patch of a green and he couldn't work out if he was supposed to be watching them or they were supposed to be watching him.

It must have set a theme for his life and it was one I could certainly identify with. A lot of the time we're just watching other people and trying to make sense of the weird, random things they're doing and why they're doing them. It works with cricket, it works with Brexit, it works with life, and it even works with cartoons.

Why would somebody draw them? To earn a living and to try and make some sense out of the peculiar. essentially meaningless, lives we have to live? With the reapers? Maybe to try and soften the blow of the one unifying thing we can all go through together. Death.

One Banx cartoon showed a swimming pool ladder descending into a freshly dug grave, a childlike way of understanding what death means but perhaps as good as any. It was certainly a great way to underline what it is to be a cartoonist. It is to be an adult trying to see things through the eyes of the confused children we all once were. Trying to regain that kind of headspace.

When I was child I hated mince pies and I still do now so, generous though the offer of some free specimens undoubtedly was, I steered clear of the monstrosities. I'd filled up, as ever, at Goddard's pie & mash earlier. Hopefully, it wasn't my last supper.

Thanx to Banx.