Martyn Turner cartoon exhibition in University College Cork, Ireland.

'The Times We Live In: Martyn Turner's Satire'

I was delighted to see this exhibition of cartoons by Martyn Turner in University College Cork (UCC) recently. The exhibition was previously on display in the Epic Emigration Museum in Dublin. It shows drafts of cartoons by Turner, whose work has appeared in the Irish Times newspaper for the last 45 years.

You can get so much into a cartoon and say things more concisely than you ever could in an article. The real beauty of political (or editorial cartoons as they are sometimes called), is that you are not as restricted as you might be when using text to get your message across to your audience. 'You can draw implicitly what you cannot say explicitly', as someone once said.

Seeing these drafts is great because you can see where he made changes as the work progressed. You can see things rubbed out and redrawn or names or words changed. Below are some of Turner's cartoons that were on display in UCC. I have selected a small number of them, but as you can see, he covers a wide range of subjects from the environment and housing to politics, international relations and everything in between.

When thinking of contemporary political cartoonists, I like the work of Patrick Chappatte, whose cartoons appear in a number of magazines and newspapers including, Der Spiegel and Le Temps. Below is one of Chappatte's award-winning cartoons from the New York Times.

Cartoon by Patrick Chappatte. Source: New York Times.

I also like the French review Revue XXI, which is like a newspaper, except instead of giving you the news and telling you stories with text and images, it uses cartoons. Cartoonists present us with stories from around the world.

Reveu XXI is reminiscent of grand reportage articles that appeared and still appear in French newspapers, where a grand reporter journalist will travel to a country where a news story is developing and send back a colourful article full of the flavour and taste of what they find on the street.

In any one edition of the review, you could find wildly different styles of cartoon and stories from all over the planet. It's well worth checking it out, if you haven't already.

Image from a story in Revue XXI by Jeff Pourquié. Source: Revue XXI.