ACA Cartoon Fundraiser for Queensland Flood Victims

While the government mucks around with levies and compulsory donation legislation, the Australian Cartoonists’ Association (ACA) is raising funds to help put flood-affected Queenslanders back on their feet in the only way we know how - drawing!

With over 75% of Queensland now flood affected, there has already been massive destruction of property, loss of homes and loss of life. The Queensland flooding is the worst on record, and is set to worsen over the coming weeks. Flood victims and rescue workers need our help and we must support them.

To raise money, the ACA is asking its members to donate an original cartoon (or signed print) preferably on the theme of Weather, but general themed cartoons will also be accepted. If you've already got some cartoons on the topic from this month send them on through!

Please note that since the floods, Cyclone Yasi has smashed into Queensland while most of us sat behind our desks. Now there's even more reason to participate in Floodlines with all money raised going to the Premier's Disaster Relief Appeal. Just a couple of years ago many ACA members helped out in the Victorian bushfire appeal which raised thousands of dollars. Now it's Queensland's turn. So please take a look at the website and send something through. There's only SEVEN days to go. Then the ACA will announce it publicly and it'll be all systems go for a great cause.

The pieces will be auctioned and sold on the floodlines.com.au website, with all proceeds going to the Premier's Disaster Relief Appeal.

Donated cartoons to be posted to:

"Floodlines QLD Fundraiser"

"The Victoria Building"

204v/162 Albert Street

East Melbourne, VIC 3002

Entries should include:

1. Brief artist bio (50 words max) - include website.

2. Where the cartoon was originally published (if published)

3. A recommended reserve price for the piece.

4. Maximum size of A3 (Black & White or Colour.)

5. If cartoon is drawn digitally, please also email a JPG file to president@cartoonists.org.au for use on the website.

DEADLINE: Friday, 11th February.

That gives you all two weeks to get your donated cartoons in. Get scribbling!

Stanley Award Winners!

Jozef and I attended the Australian Cartoonists' Association Conference, as well as the 25th annual Stanley Awards dinner during the weekend of 13-14 November 2009. We had presented a 30-minute talk two years ago at the Wollongong conference, but this was our first time attending as delegates.

We had a fabulous time. The cartoonist contingent was warm, funny and exceptionally clever. We even got dressed up for dinner – Jozef in a black jacket, a nice snazzy crushed white shirt and black patent and gold Dolce and Gabbana sneakers (no jeans or hoodie in sight). I wored black satin pants with a crushed black blouse with pink and blue embellishments and my new black suede 1950s-style pumps, which were surprisingly comfortable despite the heel height. Dinner consisted of mixed canapés – Vietnamese rice paper rolls, salmon gravlax, panko bread-crumbed chicken drummettes and Japanese gyozas (all served with their individual sauces). The main was a choice of beef or pumpkin risotto, and the dessert was a berry meringue tart. The table centrepieces had Ferrero Rocher and Lindor Balls secreted away inside them, but I have an uncanny knack of sniffing out hidden chocolate so we found them even before dinner had commenced. Needless to say we got a huge sugar shot on the night.

The company was terrific and our raucous laughs could be heard every few minutes. The actual dinner was held at one of the rooms in the Darling Harbour Convention Centre, which had a wonderful view of the harbour and a Sydney-scape full of night lights.

But the most important part was the actual Awards themselves and we were lucky to have been seated at the table with freelance political cartoonist, Adelaide-based Peter Broelman who picked up two official awards on the night – Cartoonist of the Year and Editorial/Political Cartoonist of the Year. Broelman acknowledged the global financial crisis, the swine flu outbreak, and the asylum seekers in his speech.

Other Stanley Award winners include – Gary Clark (comic strip Swamp), Matt Golding (single gag cartoons), Anton Emdin (illustrations), David Follett (media graphic artist) and John Spooner (caricatures).

During the actual conference, Jozef and I sat near a cultured elderly man with a white mop of hair. We offered up our seats to who we thought was his wife, but she declined. Later on we found out that this gentleman was no other than Mr Squiggle creator and former Bulletin cartoonist 88-year old Norman Hetherington, who was awarded the Jim Russell Award for outstanding contribution to Australian cartooning. Mr Hetherington was met with a standing ovation during his speech.

We also had an opportunity to have a chat with MAD Magazine caricaturist Tom Richmond. I told him a story of my travels through the USA during the late 70s when I was a kid. My family had gone on an overseas trip for six months and we had finished our US leg in New York City. I was buying gifts for all my school class mates and I bought up ten MAD books for the boys. Needless to say, my love affair with MAD began at that moment – I loved the books so much I kept them and indeed still have them. There's nothing like the film parodies or Spy vs Spy to keep you laughing. When Jozef and I had the good fortune to be given a tour of the DC offices after the 2007 New York ComicCon, the bit I loved seeing the most and which brought back the nicest memories was the MAD offices.

During the Stanley Award presentation, our FaceBook friend and now real-life friend Jules Faber announced the first inductees into the Hall of Fame. These honourees were Ginger Meggs creator, Jim Bancks, Stan Cross, Will Dyson, Percy Leason, Norman Lindsay and Pulitzer Prize winning Australian political cartoonist Pat Oliphant.

It was a fabulous night and we thank Jules Faber for helping make it happen.

For more information about the Australian Cartoonists' Association check out their website.

Marge Simpson Poses for Playboy

Read it in the Sun Herald last weekend so it must be true – in the Simpsons' 20th anniversary year Marge Simpson has posed for US Playboy magazine on both the cover and in the centrefold with an accompanying interview entitled "The Devil in Marge Simpson". Hilarious but sort of upsetting at the same time as Marge (along with Lisa) seem to be the only Simpsons with a little bit of commonsense. Don't know whether a nude spread establishes her as an independent woman with a naughty streak or whether it will complete ruin her reputation and street cred. How can we talk about her in this way? Well, the Simpsons are as real to us as Dame Edna Everage whose purple hair is as famous as Marge's blue bouffant. The magazine hits newsstands on 16 October 2009.

Simpsons Internet Cartoon Parody Judged to be Child Porn [UPDATED & LINKS ADDED]

We don't know whether the legal ruling you are about to read about sets a troubling precedent, or whether it is a legitimate means of protecting our children. We picked up this story up from Neil Gaiman's LiveJournal and website, courtesy of James A Owen, who put us in the know. (It's slightly embarrassing that we had to find out about this from our American and English compatriots but it does demonstrate the power of the Internet and the fact that we perhaps need to follow the local news more closely!) 

Anyway, as the story goes – one of Neil Gaiman's Australian fans posted a link to a Melbourne Age article, which tells us that:

A NSW Supreme Court judge has ruled an internet cartoon in which lookalike child characters from The Simpsons engage in sexual acts in child pornography.

In a landmark finding Justice Michael Adams today upheld a decision convicting a man of possessing child pornography after the cartoons, depicting characters modelled on Bart, Lisa and Maggie engaging in sex acts were found on his computer.

"If the persons were real, such depictions could never be permitted," Justice Adams said in his judgement. "Their creation would constitute crimes at the very highest end of the criminal calendar."

We investigated further and pulled pieces from other articles to give you/us a more broader picture. ABC News, says:

The magistrate had rejected a submission that cartoon depictions or representations of fiction characters such as The Simpsons were not of "persons".

Justice Adams said the legislation's main purpose was to combat the direct sexual exploitation and abuse of children that occurs when offensive images of real children are made.

But, he said, it was also calculated to deter production of other material, including cartoons, which "can fuel demand for material that does involve the abuse of children".

And the Parramatta Sun reported that: 

The barrister Greg Barns, a specialist in criminal and human rights law, said the decision showed that the laws surounding child pornographer were too broad if cartoons could be classified as child pornography.

"These sort of parodies, offensive as they might be, are widely distributed and I think it would be very unfair to characterise those who are viewing the images as ... viewing child porn," he said.

In his post, the Neil Gaiman fan quite rightly asks what the implications will be for him as a reader/collector of graphic novels such as Alan Moore's and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls, which is sold here not only in comics shops but we must add, also in well known book stores like Borders. And what about yaoi, where the key word is "boy love"? Are the teenage fictional "boys" depicted in these stories under the age of consent and thus do they fall within the definition of child pornography? 

Many years ago, Jozef and I also looked at an erotic comic adaption of the popular fairy tale The Little Mermaid – the characters were not prepubescent children around the ages of The Simpsons gang, but were supposedly about 16 or 17. In my library I also have a copy of Erotica Universalis by Gilles Neret, a compilation of erotic art through the ages from Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt to modern times. The book was published by the famous German art publisher Taschen in 1994. In the Erotica Moderna section, there are several etchings by  Martin Van Maele in "The Great Danse Macabre of the Quick (Prick) [c.1907]" series. (More art on the SxArt blog.) Some of these etchings depict post Victorian schoolgirls sexually interacting with their schoolboy counterparts (the image on the Wikipedia site would be of kids between 12 to 14 perhaps; some of the other plates in the series have younger kids showing each other their genitals). Do these images constitute child pornography and does this recent ruling mean that I can be arrested for possessing them in an anthology in my professional library? These are more on parr with the accurate depiction of the human figure than whatever naive artwork The Simpsons parody may offer. Oh, and by the way, from memory I bought this Taschen book from the NSW Art Gallery.

To read more about Child Pornography Laws, including definitions, go to the Parliament of NSW website.

We do not advocate child pornography in the slightest and absolutely understand the need for vigilance – the issue here is whether or not fictional matter in the form of cartoon characters can be defined as child pornography. As portfolio holders of the Australian Society of Authors (ASA) Comics/Graphic Novels Portfolio, we have brought this issue to the attention of the Executive Director and the Free Speech Portfolio Holder, so we will keep a close eye on this matter. We're also going to try and find the court transcripts and look at the "offending" images in question, as this blog report is entirely second hand and has been sourced from newspaper and online articles.

You can read more about this at PW The Beat.

In the meantime, we wonder what Matt Groening has to say on all this matter ...

It's Started!

Don't you love the brilliance of political cartoonists!