The six-year period covered my new book has seen wars, global plague, more UK prime ministers than I can Google and the death of one head of the British royal family (at the time of writing). It was a stormy time for football as well. Guys, two different teams won the Premier League.
My job every Tuesday is to provide a cartoon summary of the weekly football stories for the vigilante anti-growth extremists at the Guardian, and present here the choicest cuts of the strips I didn’t completely hate.
People often stop me on the street and breathlessly ask me to reveal the secrets of the Artistic Process. Criminally, I’ve never been asked to share details of my daily life for a glossy Sunday supplement, thus providing conclusive evidence that I’m being silenced by the MAIN MEDIA (if you ignore the fact that this volume is a compilation of cartoons for a national newspaper) . However, you were good enough to get this book from someone who vaguely knows you like football, so my reward is to let you peek into the artist’s studio while you inevitably sit reading this on the toilet, perched on top of your own mess. as you review my last six years of work. you’re welcome x
3 am: I wake up to my personal trainer, Claude, with a crow’s egg and a conical flask of bone marrow juice. Claude then explains the latest internet memes to me while I perform five hundred finger presses to prepare my hand for the creative endeavors ahead. He also reads the direct messages from people who pretend they don’t understand my A-League cartoons, some feigning genuine anger and frustration – a long-standing inside joke I’ve come to love with My Public.
5 am: Jump in the pool. I can’t swim (speedo allergy) so this really starts the day with an adrenaline rush. After Claude has massaged my heart back into action, it’s time to wash! A single hard sausage of waste is evacuated, extracted, labeled and stored to keep it out of the hands of my enemies (unfortunate Telegraph ‘Matt’!).
7 am: Eyelids pressed back, I sit in front of a huge wall of televisions, absorbing every football game that happened during my four hours of sleep. This is followed by the first of half-hourly scrolling through the various social media timelines: Lars von Trier slams Wotsits for LADbible on Facebook; some spicy opinions, formerly known as white racial hatred, on X; and a gallery of artwork by beautiful people on Instagram who are better at drawing than I am and have filtered their lifestyles in such a way that they make me feel like I’m living in a needle bin at a gas station by comparison. Confidence crushed, I’m ready to attack the day!
9 am: To my drawing board. The feather. The parchment. The ergonomic throne. An atmospheric mood is set with a deep-focus audio compilation of an inexplicably popular YouTuber yelling at a football awards ceremony, which is surprisingly soothing if you imagine being mauled by a polar bear. Trying to decipher the notes I’ve collected over the past week: “Crown Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman crossbar challenge”; “Pochettino’s Rubik’s Cube”; “Buy more crow eggs.” A rich abundance of satirical treasure. Neurological synapses flash, comedic equations dart across my vision, I squint at a Matrix-like waterfall of neon digits before inevitably deciding to just make another Roy Hodgson cartoon.
12 pm: Lunch in a gaseous state. Cheese and pickle sandwich infusion and whole liver Wotsits (nice, Lars Von). Recharged, I tackle a little more work before my favorite job of the day: family time (2:00–2:12 p.m.). Once that’s out of the way, it’s back to the old LOL factory. (Please don’t tell anyone I call it the LOL Factory.)
15:00: Pickleball session with Mark Wahlberg, Stormzy and Jake Humphrey.
5:00 p.m.: With my sketch complete, it’s time to add some flesh to the bones of my latest masterpiece with the mechanical help of a rusted construction of tubes, cogs and dials. It’s expensive to run and prone to malfunctions, but Adobe Photoshop remains the market leader for creatives who can’t be bothered to learn the basics of a new software program.
19 hours: Next comes the weekly sparring session with the lawyers, who squash the bloom of my creativity in their gray fists, claiming that my joke about Legally Redacted being redacted is “definitely defamatory,” blah, blah, blah. I am eventually forced to admit defeat when Claude advises me that even I cannot afford a lengthy legal battle with Legally Redacted. Fortunately, Faber’s legal team is not afraid of the truth.
11 in the evening: The cartoon was uploaded to the Internet. Exhausted from another day of joy and outdated cultural references to the world, I retire to my oxygen chamber. Claude dutifully edits me to sleep as I soak in the glowing online feedback, which usually takes the form of a bunch of puns and some classic banter about not understanding at least three panels.
