By Jon Link & Mick Bunnage
Publisher: Modern Toss
ISBN: 9780956419125
The first time I came across Modern Toss in the pages of Private Eye I didn’t like it. Just looked like a scribble with an obvious gag. But over the following weeks each time I read the cartoon I’d hear the characters’ speech in my head as a rather resentful but utterly resigned tone of voice. With this addition the gag clicked. All it needed for it to work for me was a bitterly dead-pan delivery.
Now the creators have collected a number of the cartoons into “Desperate Business”, a book that reflects the current economic climate with a curmudgeonly shrug of the shoulders.
These aren’t jolly gags by any means, but a black, bleak humour born of characters responding to a situation that they have little or no control of. They didn’t create the situation but they might as well deal with it now it’s here.
Rarely do you come across a smiling face in the cartoons – everyone’s angry or frustrated about something, but occasionally you’ll spy one, such as the bloke stood at the bar saying, “I earned a few bob grassing myself up as a benefit fraud”. Lots of the gags draw their humour from petty things that are funny because they’re so close to the truth. I really liked the one with an interviewer telling the job applicant that she’d not got the job so she’d have to pay three quid for the coffee and biscuits.
Or there’s the angry looking boss declaring he needs to cut his employee’s hours, and the equally surly staff member replies with, “Not a problem, any chance you could cut the ones between lunch hour and when I go home”.
Although when I first saw the cartoons I wasn’t keen on the style of the drawing, now I can’t imagine them being drawn any other way. If you’re going to have a disgruntled cartoon then what better way to draw it than in an almost begrudging manner.
My only regret is that it seems a slim tome at sixty-four pages of cartoons, but maybe that’s a reflection of the times too.
And if you liked that: See if you can lay your hands on a copy of Digesting The Child Within by John Callaghan
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