Herne Bay Cartoon Festival 2017
Our theme for the 2017 festival was “The End of the Pier Show”. Chris Burke designed the poster for us.
Actually, there were two different versions of the poster for the first time in the festival’s history. In version one (released in April) Jeremy Corbyn is a smaller figure behind the more prominent Theresa May. But as the General Election on the 8th June loomed, it seemed almost possible that Corbyn would defeat May. And so in the new version he became a little larger and nearer the front (as seen on the last slide above).
2017 was the first year we moved the Live Cartooning event to Herne Bay Pier, which proved to be very successful. We welcomed 25 cartoonists and more than 3000 visitors onto the pier during the event on Sunday August 6th.
Also this year we became part of the new community summer festival for Herne Bay known as Bayfest. We had two exhibitions at Beach Creative.
The first was the End of the Pier Show with new work from the ProCartoonists on display.
The second was Eaten Fish.

Eaten Fish is an Iranian cartoonist who was then being held in the notorious Australian-run detention centre on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, simply because he was a refugee. In a Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation initiated campaign backed by CRNI (Cartoonists Rights Network International) cartoonists around the world were drawing
Our exhibition featured work done in the UK and globally. Many of the cartoonist involved attended the Herne Bay Cartoon Festival. We held a workshop inviting participants to draw their own fish cartoons to add to the exhibition.
At the Bay Art Gallery we were delighted to present a new exhibition of work by The Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson.

We were excited to welcome Martin to the festival for the first time. Martin delivered a provocative and funny talk about his work to an audience of around 350 at the Kings Hall. This was a free event and the first time we had organized something of this kind. It was promoted heavily using social media and tickets were available from Eventbrite. The interviewer was Canterbury’s recently elected Labour MP Rosie Duffield.
Our festival exhibition at The Seaside Museum this year was entitled Cartoonists All at Sea and once again it featured work from the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent.