FROM GAGS TO RICHES

Sculptors can be famed for their feats of clay. Miniaturists will always choose the lesser of two easels. Photographers must never take a dim view of things. But cartoonists, well, they should just be funny. And, in a country in which the art is if not quite dead then certainly in dire need of hospice care, the work of Tom Mathews is an inspiring reminder of just how funny cartoons can be.

“To an extent, a lot of what you do is constructed,” muses the man himself. “You put this element with this element and that’s the joke. But if you haven’t got the magic bit as well, it’s not really going to work. It’s not something you learn overnight, if you can do it at all. It’s something that you have to bring the initial spark to. You have to have a love for comedy and for the forms of humour. Certainly, for my part, I research non-stop. I watch a lot of comedy shows, I read anything that comes out, I have a giant collection of reference books.”

The dumbest question that Tom Mathews is most frequently asked is, “Where do your ideas come from?” Keen to avoid such an obvious and clichéd trap, I opt for another route. “From where do your ideas come?” I inquire.

“Good question, Liam,” he retorts, clearly impressed. “The answer is that you get them out of our mind but how you get them out of there I don’t know.”

“Can you expand a little?” I entreat.

“No, I’m quite happy with the size I am, thank you, but I will elaborate on my previous answer,” he says. “I think it’s impossible to explain creativity. If you’re a 9 stone weakling and you lift dumb-bells everyday until you’re twenty then suddenly you’ll find that you’re a 9 stone weakling who can lift dumb-bells. There’s probably some creative muscle somewhere that develops if you keep tormenting and torturing it long enough.”

Tom’s main source of inspiration is his reservoir of notebooks (56 at last count), each one awash with puns, sketches and one-liners. Most of these gag-germs sprout when he is sitting in a pub, quaffing with friends, and he always endeavours to immediately scribble them down. Inevitably, his notebooks are also awash with Guinness stains, telephone numbers and the names of people to whom he owes money. A separate exhibition of these will be staged later in the year.

“There’s nothing worse than trying to remember something that you can remember thinking of but not actually remember what it was,” he avers. “The perfect cartoon is one that comes to you from nowhere, like a gift. Maybe half a dozen times a year, something just springs into your head unbidden, and it’s a complete cartoon. The best ones often come like that. If I feel totally out of ideas I’ll fish all the notebooks out, and start trawling through them again. If I’m lucky, something that looked like half a gag has now become an entire gag during the intervening five years.”

Mathews has been a professional cartoonist now for almost twenty years but it’s only in the last decade that he has been able to earn a creditable living from his craft. His primary outlets are The Irish Times and Hot Press but he has also been charcoaling up an increasing quantity of advertising work recently.

“Nobody likes to be poor,” he declares. “I wouldn’t say that I was a wealthy guy but I try to take care of myself. I like to have enough to eat and drink and the price of admission to the cinema. To that end, I don’t turn work down. I’m now probably doing a little bit better than if I was a junior clerk or something like that but I don’t have to be anywhere between 9 and 5 to do it. I’m working at a speed and at a level and in a country where I don’t think I’m going to burn out fast. The drawing gets better. I’d certainly say that the stuff I’ve cranked out in the last five years makes the earlier stuff look pretty tame and badly drawn.

“The outlets are just sufficient to take care of the inspiration. I don’t find myself top-heavy with stuff, wishing that I lived in New York so I could sell them. Hot Press is a very nice thing to do but it’s fortnightly. It’s the world’s most fortnightly magazine. Unfortunately, if you’re living on the world’s most fortnightly check then you’re aren’t making a living. Therefore, I’m very pleased to be able to something like the agency work or the Education Supplement in The Irish Times.”

Cartooning to order is a skill that has taken many years to learn.

“Initially, there’s nothing more appalling than being handed a text and being told to fish something out of that for a cartoon,” Mathews insists. “After a while, it becomes instinctive. There’s always a gag in there somewhere. You’re not talking here about brilliance, you’re talking here about filling up a space in the paper, but you’re not talking about cranking out crap either. It’s the best you can do in the time available but it’s not the sort of purifying, careless, rapture of futility that the other stuff hopefully is.”

Mathews’ drawing style is instantly recognisable in its clarity and precision. You could examine his work through a microscope powerful enough to measure a solicitor’s integrity and still not a find a comically-invalid stroke.

“I always try and keep my style minimal without making it entirely kitchen-sink. Simplicity is everything. There’s no point drawing an entire city behind two guys making a remark. I know there’s a school of thought which says that you should make everything look real or even set an amazing 3D MGM effect in the background, but I think that’s crazy. Some genius in America figured out that the attention span that people devote to a cartoon is three seconds. That’s all the time you have to get your idea across.”

He has a fascination with the subliminal too but he’s never really noticed it (boom boom!). His Hot Press cartoons in particular are noted for the bizarre and cryptic comments that he often appends beneath the feature that has become the signature of his work, his signature.

“They serve the purpose of mystifying the reader,” he asserts. “It’s akin to the purpose served by the Kathy Evans Corner, to make people scratch their heads and say, ‘What the fuck is that all about?’.”

Clinical Neurologists have identified a syndrome called witzelsucht, or ‘joking disease’, wherein sufferers exhibit an overwhelming and unabating tendency to wordplay, puns and wisecracks. Does Tom ever fear that his own eternal quest for punchlines may have incurred a damaging effect on his brain?

“I hope it hasn’t,” he replies. “It’s very hard to tell because I’m going to have to use my own brain to answer this question. I think it works okay. It gets me from A to B. They say that braincells die off when you reach a certain age. I think that’s probably about eighteen. They’ve been dying off for quite a while now but I think they’re being replaced by something else.”

Tom Mathews is currently hosting an exhibition of his cartoons at The 101 Talbot Restaurant on Dublin’s Talbot Street. A total of forty-five pieces are on show, culled from the past three years of work out of a possible three hundred. For prices ranging between a mere £45 and an only slightly less mere £100, you too can own a Mathews original. “The pieces I’ve chosen struck me as the ones that were well enough drawn to be interesting to look at and non-contemporary enough to stand the test of being a joke independent of any text surrounding it,” he states.

Tom is also half-way through his second novel, the follow-up to his neglected early eighties classic, Levon. Ultimately though, it is cartoons that are his first love. His second love is cartoonists.

“Oh, I love them all,” he chirrups. “I couldn’t say a word against any of them . They’re the nicest guys in the world. I suspect that a lot of the guys who do The Phoenix are civil servants who have an hour to spend in the evenings, but I know all the full-timers here.

“Robert Crumb is my worldwide old hero, a ’60s renegade and lunatic living in France now. I’ve never met him but I correspond with him. The New Yorker boys are all very sharp. The tragedy of course was Punch conking out after 150 years as the big shop window for England. It just completely burned out.”

Before you meet Tom Mathews, you encounter his formidable moustache, a hedgerow of bushy lichen that appears to have taken hold of the lower part of his face.

“Around eighteen, I took an interest in this matter,” he explains. “I was watching A Night At The Opera, and there was something about Groucho, even though his moustache wasn’t a real moustache, that encouraged me to believe that there is something nice about moustaches. I immediately decided to invest in one myself. It’s seen many manifestations. It spent about five years being Frank Zappa’s moustache. Then, when Frank died, I thought that’s enough of that. But, essentially, I think there’s something about moustaches that enhances any jokes that come out from beneath them.”

• The exhibition of Tom Mathews cartoons runs at 101 Talbot St. for the next five weeks.