People and Personalities

Local cartoonist Gary Coley, aka GAZ, has gone global, after one of his illustrations featured in a CNN news story on Barack Obama.

The cartoon poked fun at the ever-popular topic of the ‘White House puppy’ using GAZ’s trademark dog to illustrate the puppy in question.

The CNN cartoon! Copyright Gary Coley 2008

But this cartoon may never have been enjoyed by a worldwide audience if new technology hadn't made the distribution of cartons easier and the experience has made Gary, who has recently returned to cartooning after his career took a different direction, realise how much things have changed since he was last in the industry.

Gary, who creates political and social commentary cartoons, is now based at the Hat Factory in Luton.

During an initial 10 years as a cartoonist after college, his work appeared in publications like The Voice, the Guardian and New Nation. He then moved more into more traditional journalism and marketing work, but finally, after a number of years in the corporate world, he felt the call of his pen and decided to return to what he loves.

You can now find his cartoons in The Voice newspaper, where he has just returned as their political cartoonist, and CNN’s use of his work not only validates his triumphant return, but also shows how new technology has transformed the cartoon world in the years that he has been away.

It is the advances in technology that have enabled him to start to reach this global audience. He has a daily mail out of cartoons which he calls the Daily Gaz and The White House cartoon was originally picked up from his daily blog which includes a catalogue of cartoons as well as video clips of the artist explaining the concept behind his drawings. These are all things that weren’t available to the young cartoonist straight out of art college!

Artists like Gary now have fewer constraints and greater freedom. They are less reliant on third parties such as publishers and distributors, which allows them to take more control over their work and communicate directly with their audience.

He told us about how he became a cartoonist, where his ideas come from and how the use of the latest technology is helping him in his work.

When did you first realise that you had a talent for this sort of thing?

Gary: I got a Punch annual as a Christmas present when I was about eight. A lot of the humour was way above me but I loved the drawings and some of the visual images were just so funny. It’s hard to say when I realised I had a talent, but I remember when Star Wars was popular and I drew a life size Darth Vader on my bedroom wall without my parents’ permission. I realised I had a talent when my mother, who normally ruled with an iron fist, said “that’s really good, you should leave that up there!” That’s when I thought maybe I’ve got something!

I was always doodling and things and I was lucky that my mother was always very keen to push me forward with art. She saw something there and encouraged me to draw and at secondary school I had a very supportive art teacher.

Through a lot of support I then got to Chelsea Art college which at the time was a very elite art college to get into. As a young black man from Brixton it was quite an achievement but I didn’t realise that at the time! But I got in through the support of a lot of people, and I would say that if you have a child who is into the arts and being creative then encourage them.

So, at art college, did you know that you wanted to be a cartoonist?

Gary: Oh yes, that’s all I wanted to do! In fact I knew very little about anything else, I was so focused on drawing cartoons. At art college I just drew as many cartoons as I could, much to the dismay of my tutors who wanted me to pursue other things like fine arts.

Copyright Gary Coley 2008

But I always wanted to be a cartoonist and in the end I heard the calling of my pen to bring me back. I’d literally ignored my pen for years and moved away into writing and different roles within the media. Now, people ask me, why, at 44, am I going back to something and starting from square one again. But I just say to them “it’s what I am”. I believe that all of us are creative, we all have something in us and we have to find a way to pursue that, because that’s the thing that puts that sugar in our lives.

How did you get your first job?

Gary: My first break was with The Voice newspaper. I just bombarded the paper with loads of cartoons and offered to come in and work for free initially, so that they could see what I could do. But this was back in the mid 80s and back then it was a lot easier because newspapers had a lot more power. Now we have the Internet and loads of different ways for people to get news and information, so the power of newspapers, particularly smaller newspapers, has diminished.

Back then The Voice had a circulation of about 300,000 and getting the role of cartoonist was fantastic because it was a very pioneering newspaper and took on lots of different issues for the black community. There [at The Voice] you were a cartoonist at the forefront and you had this real following, so from doing The Voice I then was able to pick up other work at different publications. I had a full schedule and it was great!

So why did you stop?

Gary: One day I got asked by a journalist who couldn’t go to cover an arts event if I could go instead. I said that I couldn’t because I wasn’t a journalist but they said I wrote captions for cartoons so I was! I’d never thought that I was a cartoonist / journalist before, so I went and covered this event. I moved into writing although I was still drawing cartoons and that was the slippery slope!

Over time I moved more into management roles. For example, I moved from The Voice after numerous years to go to the New Nation where my major role was the sponsorship and promotions manager for the newspaper as well as the cartoonist. That was a very stressful role! But then I moved right out of the media and took corporate roles where I wasn’t doing anything creative and wasn’t even around creative people

But then you felt the call of the pen again and you’re back?

Gary: I came back into it because I had a lot of family and friends saying that they didn’t know why I’d given it up. But also, I hadn’t pursued it properly or tried to do it as a business. Cartooning was a love, and like many creative people, when they do it, they forget about the business side of things and planning for the future.

I decided I was going to try and come back into it and met a friend who had some involvement with Luton Cultural Services who have business incubation offices at the Hat Factory. I went along and met director Andy Gray and discussed how I wanted to push solely as a cartoonist even though I’d been out of the game a long time. He said take a unit and come back! Coming back has been great because the situation is very different now, regarding how you can get your work out there.

What sort of things are different now?

Gary: There’s the fact that computers are so important in what you do. I now scan a lot of the work I do now into a PC and then colour it with the computer, whereas once you’d sit down with a pen.

But also it’s about getting your work out there. It is now feasible for you to actually market and develop a following online without using a newspaper or magazine to promote yourself.

I’ve also got a blog where I put up all my artwork – the Daily Gaz.

Copyright Gary Coley 2008

And other people then pick that up, like CNN?

Gary: Yes. That was a bit of a crazy situation. In trying to get my work out, I put up regular video blogs on YouTube, and on CNN I put up regular video blogs. I did a blog on Obama and his puppy and sent it out via my normal emailing and put it on my blog and my video blog on YouTube. I then got contacted by a blogger in America who asked if they could put the video feed onto their site. I didn’t think anymore about it until I got an email from the Editor of The Voice who just mentioned in an aside that he saw my video on CNN and I thought it was a joke!

My sister in DC then did a search and there it was in some news coverage of the President elect’s puppy! So it just proves really what can be done via the Internet, the world is really now your market place, your audience.

What advice would you give to youngsters looking to get into this kind of work?

Gary: There are a lot of things you can do if you’re a creative in terms of drawing. If I had a youngster who could draw I would be looking for them to link in with new technology so that they can go into industries such as computer animation and movies. That’s something I wish I’d moved into. Obviously computer animation wasn’t as big when I was growing up, but now I wish I could animate some of my stuff!

How do you get your ideas?

Gary: I look at newspapers and magazines, search the Web and watch BBC News 24 and I listen to what people are talking about around, as they say, the watercooler. I then come to a decision on what might be funny – I’m not always right but I try!

Does something then spring into your mind about how you’re going to illustrate this? You’re trying to say something but in just one frame, does this come naturally to you?

Gary: It does come naturally to me but it’s a skill that I’ve developed over the years. You have to take an idea and to try and put it down in a way that people can clearly understand, because you’re trying to make people aware of what the subject is. You want people to understand where it is and who the characters are, and then you’ve got to have the punchline as well, so it’s a kind of layering of the cartoon. Also, I have the added issue of trying to make one cartoon be understood by someone in the US and someone in the UK.

You’re ideally trying to find somebody who’s newsworthy across the world, or, you’re having to ask yourself how to make a cartoon about an issue in one particular country, understood in another country. We’re in difficult times at the moment and you’re trying to give people a little laugh but you’re still trying to educate them and make them aware. You’re trying to find a way to give people information which is quite often bad, but you’re trying to sugar coat it, that’s what cartoons do.

It’s easier to get a serious point across if people are laughing about it, but satire is quite a responsibility really, isn’t it?

Gary: You can write a long article on something and people won’t take it all in, but as a cartoonist  we take the key points of an issue and put it together in a very concise form so that people can very quickly get an understanding of what the issue is and get a little bit of a laugh. There’s a responsibility to try and get it right and you also have to be very careful that you don’t cause offence. Quite often I’ll draw something and think, hang on this is a bit too far? If you look at the cartoonists in the newspapers around the world they all have to walk a very fine line.

And of course, there’s a constant argument as to where the line is?

Gary: Absolutely. I did some cartoons around the whole Jonathan Ross situation and I found myself thinking “hang on, where is the line?” In the UK we live in a society where we’re quite liberal with our humour. In America they are quite inhibited – there are a lot of controls over what people can say and do – it’s hard to believe they are the land of the free!

But in the UK we can push the line so it’s always very difficult as a cartoonist. You’re trying to get a point out, you’re trying to entertain and make sure that you’re not yesterday’s news and push the barrier a little bit, but it’s difficult to know where the line is.

And it’s different for different people isn’t it?

Gary: Absolutely. It’s like with the Daily Gaz, if I was just doing it for a little village newspaper, you know your audience very clearly. You know where the lines are. But when it’s national and your net is wide, it’s very hard.

Part of being hip at the moment is that you have to push the barrier a little bit so, on one hand you have responsibility to try not to offend, but on the other hand you have a responsibility to try and push humour to the line where it’s almost touching, caressing, offence. There’s a real skill to doing that, and it’s a very tricky skill!