My 20th Birthday Party - at age 46

Friday night was my 20th birthday party. Well, technically it was the 20th birthday party of my cartoon strip, Queen's Counsel, which has been running for 20 years in The (London) Times, since it was first published in October 1993. Friday was a good excuse to have a party, sell a few books, and celebrate my longest-ever job, by far.

Tom Bancroft introduces his new web comic "Outnumbered"

Outnumbered by Tom Bancroft

Tom Bancroft is a Disney animator with many, many film credits to his name. His career highlights include supervising the animation of the dragon Mushu, voiced by Eddie Murphy, on the 1998 hit Mulan. Visitors to the Disney parks can still see Tom talk about creating Mushu on the Magic of Disney Animation tour. Tom has also worked on many projects as director, concept artist and storyboard artist. Recently he started the web comic Outnumbered. FLIP asked Tom to tell us about this new online cartoon strip.

Dining with the Dinosaurs - the Cartoonist's Dinner

Last week I had dinner with some dinosaurs. Or, as they are more commonly known, cartoonists. The occasion was the semi-annual dinner of the BCA, that is to say the British Cartoonists Association (confusing, they also call themselves the PCO, or Pro Cartoonists Association). Anyway, open up a British newspaper (remember them?), turn to the nearest cartoon and, chances are, the cartoonist will be a member of the BCA. Or the PCO. Or both.

The night my cartoon strip almost died

Lincoln's Inn Hall - scene of the crime

Twenty years ago I became a barrister. A barrister is a kind of English lawyer - the kind that wear wigs. Think John Cleese in A Fish Called Wanda. If you want to become a barrister in England, you used to have to dine formally on 24 occasions with your fellow law students, in the dining halls of the Inns of Court, (in theory) discussing the finer points of law and jurisprudence. So I spent many evenings dining in Lincoln’s Inn hall.

Roman Cartoons! (with some fruity language)

Cartoons - Roman style

The hot ticket right now in London is Pompeii at the British Museum - a vast collection of art and artifacts collected from the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the seaside towns famously destroyed in 67BC by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Both towns were completely covered in ash - and were thereby preserved for posterity even as the rest of Roman civilisation fell to the barbarian hordes (that's you and me).

Who Needs a Website Anyway?

My re-re-re-designed website

Fifteen years ago in Los Angeles I met a guy who had his own website. "How pretentious" I thought. "Who the hell needs one of those?" Well, duh. Obviously, I could not have been more wrong. Nowadays everyone needs a website. At least, everyone who is a freelancer.

The Dealers - or how I got a cartoon strip into a celebrity gossip magazine

For a brief while in the 1990s I had a cartoon strip running in The Tatler, a society gossip magazine which wasn't so much full of pictures of celebrities as Sloane Rangers. So many in fact, that the joke was that the magazine was largely read by the people photographed inside its pages.

Writer’s Block - the birth, life and death of a newspaper cartoon strip

A Literary Odyssey

Back in 2005 I briefly had two cartoon strips running in The Times. As well as Queen’s Counsel (published in the law pages since 1993) I successfully pitched one for the Saturday books section. It was titled Writer’s Block, and was a gentle satire on the literary world which I dreamed up with a writer friend in Los Angeles, the very talented Erica Rothschild.

The birth of Queen's Counsel, plus a very nasty letter

In 1993 I was a law student in London, working occasionally at Disney during my summer vacations to pay my way through school. I also had a part-time job working for a Member of Parliament, a kind man called Peter Thurnham, who let me run loose in the Palace of Westminster pretending to be on important business.