During my final year at university, some enterprising people decided to set up a campus newspaper as an alternative to the largely terrible campus magazine (which got progressively more dismal over the course of three years, slowly metamorphosing from a big black-and-white broadsheet filled with news, reviews and funny things into a revenge-invitingly awful full-colour poster booklet, filled with huge glossy photographs of drunken lecherous students in nightclubs. Depressingly, this seemed to heighten its popularity no end). The result was Student Press, and it was really rather good.
After overcoming some initial hiccups (comprehensively libelling the entire Conservative Party on the front page of the very first issue, for instance), it gradually developed a style of its own and gathered a sizeable readership, and letters began to arrive, requiring a separate page on which to print the ones that were at least vaguely grammatically accurate. It was about then that the editor, a jolly good chap called Mark Stevenson, got in touch to ask if I would be prepared to supply a special cartoon each issue, relating to one of the main stories, to enliven the page with letters on it in the traditional fashion. (He’d seen a drawing of mine published in the university magazine, cleverly cropped to fit the allocated space by cutting off the explanatory tag line.) I said “Yes”, and history was made. Or, more correctly, some cartoons.
This continued even after I concluded my degree course and came back home, because Mark still wanted to use my illustrations and - gasp! - wanted to pay me for them, with real money and everything. It may, therefore, seem a bit odd that there are only eight of the things to show for two years’ worth of newspapers, until you remember that it’s a university newspaper, and so only publishes during term time, and only when everyone isn’t running around and shouting while writing essays and taking exams.
Mark has now left the university himself, so it’s uncertain whether there’ll be any more. But who knows? More news as I stumble across it by accident.
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