Sunday, March 18, 2018
New Brexit comic to be launched
Anybody who has been following the spoof Trumpton Twitter account will be delighted to learn from today's Observer that its progenitor, illustrator and author Mike Dicks is to launch a Brexit comic featuring some of the regular Twitter characters, including the Reverend May and her Brexit Gang, David Dealin’ Davis and Boris “Captain Brexit” Johnson.
The comic will go into circulation next month, loosely based on the classic 1960s children’s TV programme Trumpton. Mike Dicks has raised £4,400 via crowdfunding to pay for the first edition, which will be posted to donors and supporters by 1 April:
Dicks, a former independent TV producer, began with caricatures of Ukip leader Nigel Farage in the run-up to the 2016 referendum.
“I’d been worrying about him and Ukip,” Dicks told the Observer. “I kept thinking about how Farage was looking back to a golden age, but he’s about the same age as me, so what era is he referencing? My recollection of the 1960s and 70s was that in many ways it was a rather shit time.
“He made me think of Trumpton, which was about an old-fashioned town with no foreigners – except Mr Antonio the ice-cream man, who was almost run out of town – and an autocratic mayor. It seemed the sort of place and sort of Britain Farage was nostalgic about, so I started a Trumpton_Ukip Twitter account to gently mock him, his supporters and their backward-looking views. It had a couple of hundred followers at most, enjoying my silly jokes.”
The paper says that only 13 episodes of Trumpton were made, but many still remember Captain Flack’s fire brigade roll call: “Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grub.”
Dicks’s Trumpton has a different crew: “May, May, Johnson and Gove, Macron, Merkel and Mogg” – the two May characters reflecting the prime minister’s shifting position on Brexit.
Who was it who said that laughter is the best medicine? It certainly helps to have a sense of humour, a lesson that UKIP MEP David Coburn might want to take on board.
He was apparently unaware that the Trumpton UKIP account was a spoof and urged his 9,000 Twitter followers to complain about what he considered to be a “fake” UKIP account. He attempted to have it shut down, threatening to sue Dicks under European copyright laws.
“It suddenly went from a couple of hundred followers to 20,000,” Dicks said. “Then dozens of other Twitter accounts sprang up mocking UKIP and we were in the newspapers, so it all blew up in his face.”
This comic sounds like it is worth subscribing too.
The comic will go into circulation next month, loosely based on the classic 1960s children’s TV programme Trumpton. Mike Dicks has raised £4,400 via crowdfunding to pay for the first edition, which will be posted to donors and supporters by 1 April:
Dicks, a former independent TV producer, began with caricatures of Ukip leader Nigel Farage in the run-up to the 2016 referendum.
“I’d been worrying about him and Ukip,” Dicks told the Observer. “I kept thinking about how Farage was looking back to a golden age, but he’s about the same age as me, so what era is he referencing? My recollection of the 1960s and 70s was that in many ways it was a rather shit time.
“He made me think of Trumpton, which was about an old-fashioned town with no foreigners – except Mr Antonio the ice-cream man, who was almost run out of town – and an autocratic mayor. It seemed the sort of place and sort of Britain Farage was nostalgic about, so I started a Trumpton_Ukip Twitter account to gently mock him, his supporters and their backward-looking views. It had a couple of hundred followers at most, enjoying my silly jokes.”
The paper says that only 13 episodes of Trumpton were made, but many still remember Captain Flack’s fire brigade roll call: “Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grub.”
Dicks’s Trumpton has a different crew: “May, May, Johnson and Gove, Macron, Merkel and Mogg” – the two May characters reflecting the prime minister’s shifting position on Brexit.
Who was it who said that laughter is the best medicine? It certainly helps to have a sense of humour, a lesson that UKIP MEP David Coburn might want to take on board.
He was apparently unaware that the Trumpton UKIP account was a spoof and urged his 9,000 Twitter followers to complain about what he considered to be a “fake” UKIP account. He attempted to have it shut down, threatening to sue Dicks under European copyright laws.
“It suddenly went from a couple of hundred followers to 20,000,” Dicks said. “Then dozens of other Twitter accounts sprang up mocking UKIP and we were in the newspapers, so it all blew up in his face.”
This comic sounds like it is worth subscribing too.
