Monday, June 18, 2012

Looking at things differently

A month or so back I did a very long and nerdy post about the sinking of the Titanic (having just read Walter Lord's famous account of the disaster, A Night To Remember). I mentioned in passing a childhood recollection of this cartoon by Bill Tidy, one of the mainstays of Punch magazine in the '60s and '70s. As a result of exchanges in the comment thread there, a friend helped me track it down online.

Curiously, the cartoon is not at all as I remembered it. The gag is the same, but the drawing completely different. I wonder whether it is my memory playing tricks on me, or if Bill Tidy was adapting an earlier cartoon.


2 comments:

John said...

Look what I found this time- http://bp.substrakt.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/tidy_iceberg.jpg This is also Tidy's and is what appears on the cover of his autobiography even; you'll probably have to read that to find out why he drew two versions!

This is the start of me catching up on the blog, I've been somewhat busy lately. I'm even hoping to tackle the original Titanic thread again or at least give it a fair shot time-constraints considered.
I can see this taking a while!

Froog said...

Thanks for that link.

This second version seems a tad more familiar, but it still doesn't accord with my (possibly phantom) memory - which was that Tidy was speaking about having been inspired by a vintage Punch cartoon of this, perhaps no more than a decade or so after the event, and still with that very distinct style that all of their later 19th and early 20th century drawings had.