Who won at the first Splats! cartoon awards

What do you call a phalanx of cartoonists? A scribble? A squiggle? A rejection?  

Whatever the term, a group of the UK’s finest visual jokesmiths got together at Channel 4’s London headquarters on Thursday for the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation’s first annual awards, The Splats!, G Neil Martin writes.

Hosted by the group’s chair Clive Goddard, the  Splats are voted on by the public and celebrate the best of last year’s cartoons and cartoonists in an evening that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Best editorial cartoon was introduced by Metro cartoonist Guy Venables, pictured above with a speech partly written by ChatGPT.

In an excoriating, funny mauling of the the self-important editorial cartoonist, he outlined the lofty plight of broadsheet toilers saying they ‘have the hardest job because they have to draw much bigger cartoons than other cartoonists do and so this lets them off having to make their cartoons funny. Their work largely involves specifically altering a specific set of paintings. Where do you get your ideas from?, an editorial cartoonist is asked.  An editorial cartoonist will say: other people’

 Harry Burton won for the Just Stop Oil cartoon above, while Venables himself won for best pocket cartoon series.

Best strip cartoon went to Grizelda for the above, and best current affairs cartoon went to Chris Williams – also known as ‘Dink’, for the cartoon below.

Chris has a strong hinterland in this field having won, he admitted, best werewolf impression on Tiswas many decades earlier.

Kevin Wells won for this caricature of Trump:

Martin Rowson introduced the Bill Stott Award for best gag cartoon, awarded to Glenn Marshall for the joke below:

Best rejected  cartoon went to Sarah Boyce for her unsafe of two women in Kabul with empty speech bubbles, thus also winning the award for Broken Irony Meter Of The Year.

The night’s most niche award was for best nose, and ahead of the rest and not because of the size of his proboscis, was Dean Patterson, who draws under the name deAn. On receiving his award, he revealed that he had to adjust his drawing style ‘because Ian Hislop said he hated my noses’.

Pete Songi won an award for services to cartooning in recognition of his work in promoting not only existing and established cartoonists via a variety of pop-up pub exhibitions (the latest is Let It Snow at the Duke of Greenwich, London) but cartoonists trying to break into the profession. 

He was responsible for creating the online cartooning mag, The New Cartoonist, which has introduced new names to the cartooning fold. His last win, he said, was in a raffle when he was seven. He won a Tiny Tears doll.

The one category not voted on by the general public but by professional cartoonists was cartoon of the year, and this was awarded to Morten Moreland.  

Published: 18 Jan 2025