Posted in: Comics | Tagged: separated at birth, sunday times

Separated At Birth: Boris Johnson And The Sunday Times Newspaper

Published Fri, 02 Sep 2022 07:57:11 -0500

Firstly I run a Separated At Birth about my political cartoons and one in Private Eye. And now it's the Sunday Times. Here's a cartoon that I ran a few weeks ago, about the current Tory Party leadership contest, the votes for which are ending today.

Boris Johnson having a summer holiday relax, while the world burns and the candidates for Prime Minister duke it out far, far away from his beach. And then here's what the Sunday Times ran two weeks later.

Naturally, I had questions. Martin Barry, Deputy Design Editor of the Sunday Times answered themSeparated At Birth: Boris Johnson And The Sunday Times Newspaper;

The item of which you complain was a graphic created in house by The Sunday Times' design team, led by me. It was done without any knowledge of your cartoon in Guido, which we had not seen. Its purpose was solely to illustrate Tim Shipman's weekly commentary on UK politics. It did not set out to make any new comment of its own.

Much of the Shipman commentary was concerned with contrasting the inactivity of the Prime Minister, whose government has been "paralysed for months", with the "leadership battle between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak erupting in new waves of acrimony". There are only so many ways this juxtaposition can be illustrated. With the Prime Minister on holiday, a deck chair, flip-flops and a cocktail were the obvious way to illustrate his inactivity. The increasingly acrimonious battle between Truss and Sunak inevitably called for a depiction of a physical fight.

If you use google to search for 'cartoon fight' you will see several similar ways of illustrating a punch-up that are similar to yours (and ours). We used elements of a design from Alamy (https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-a-cartoon-comic-book-style-fight-dust-cloud-with-people-fighting-with-104063263.html) as a starting point and added details characteristic of Truss and Sunak to personalise it.

None of this was especially novel or ground-breaking, but nor was it meant to be. It was an illustration to summarise the week's news. The similarity of your own creation was coincidental.

As ever, you dear reader, are the judge.

Separated At Birth used to be called Swipe File, in which we present two or more images that resemble each other to some degree. They may be homages, parodies, ironic appropriations, coincidences, or works of the lightbox. We trust you, the reader, to make that judgment yourself. If you are unable to do so, we ask that you please return your eyes to their maker before any further damage is done. Separated At Borth doesn't judge; it is interested more in the process of creation, how work influences other work, how new work comes from old, and sometimes how the same ideas emerge simultaneously as if their time has just come. The Swipe File was named after the advertising industry habit where writers and artists collect images and lines they admire to inspire them in their work. It was swiped from the Comic Journal, who originally ran a similar column and the now-defunct Swipe Of The Week website, but Separated At Birth is considered a less antagonistic title.

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