25 Cartoons from 2025

25 Cartoons from 2025

Here's my annual roundup of my cartoons from 2025 a Twixmas mix of culture, politics and tech cartoons some of which were published.  Sometimes we look back at a year and the new cycles that kept us awake at night, but it is good to come out the other side and laugh at what we survived. 

1 Traitors

I drew quite a few cartoons about popular UK TV programmes we were watching and none was bigger in 2025 than traitors set in a Scottish castle first of all with normal folks then with celebrities.  Quite a lot of cartoonists did this very gag so I'm not surprised it didn't get published.

2  Inauguration Day

20th January 2025 was the Inauguration of Donald Trump and despite being a UK based cartoonist covering mostly UK politics it was impossible to ignore the many stories from across the Atlantic of Donald Trump's appointments and executive orders that the world's media coverage.  For the record, and in case I ever need to get a visa to enter the USA this is not a criticism of the 47th president.

3 AI Careers

The other recurring theme of 2025 was the relentless drive of AI as large tech companies like Microsoft, Oracle and OpenAI all bet billions of dollars on making humans redundant inn all spheres of life.  I have a few published cartoons on the subject but this cartoon was my first Private Eye toon of the year.  It didn't go down well with radiologists who for the record shouldn't be replaced by AI.

4 Tariffs

There was a White House announcement in which Trump held up boards with made up numbers for tariffs he had imposed on other countries with some vague criteria which immediately plunged international trade into chaos which continued a lot of 2025 when depending on the president's whim a tariff could be changed up or down, or postponed with container ships on the sea.  It was certainly an interesting year to be an export business.

5 UK Immigration

In the UK Starmer struggled on the domestic front when throughout the year poll and poll had him going from an election landslide to miles behind Farage's reform.  With an election years away Starmer still spent a lot of political capital trying to be Reform-lite with various immigration announcements. 

  When a UK politician reaches for immigration the cartoonist's response is often Paddington who had a great year and ended the year on the West End stage.  So I drew Paddington too although I'm quite pleased with my Starmer caricature.

6. I wish the end was Nigh

There is a thing in US politics in trying to get a maximum effort in the first 100 days of a presidency and certainly Trump gave it a go with a raft of executive orders that largely eclipsed everyone's domestic agenda and in the early part of the year it felt quite overwhelming.

7 Marco Polo

My second published cartoon of the year came from the TV series Race across the World which again had a plebs and celebrity edition.  One of the regular pairs which did cross China included a mother and son which inspired this cartoon.

8 Sequestered

With Pope Francis death in April 2025 we had a Papal conclave which was great news for the Ralph Fiennes movie Conclave which explained how all the cardinals were sequestered.  An American Pope Leo XIV was elected after 2 days without any Hollywood drama 

9 Parody Accounts

In April 2025 Elon Musk vowed to clamp down on parody accounts which lead to this cartoon.

10 Tory Extinction

The Tory party under Kemi Badenoch didn't have the best 2025 despite being the main opposition and Keir Starmer's rating cratering the right wing votes and some of her own MPs all seemed to go Nigel Farage's way.  There was people in her own party  

11 Shakespeare in the Park

This year I did try and make my cartoons more colourful while still doing the majority black and white.  In general if you are doing a big batch of submissions (the majority of which will be rejected) you don't go daft with colour and backgrounds, but sometimes it does help give the cartoon a bit more if there is colour.  This one while rejected was still enhanced by me adding in a touch of green grass.

12 Drone Pawn

It's sadly the case that wars continued to rage throughout 2025, and the Ukraine and Gaza war were not easy subjects when conflicts that had lasted so long had already so much drawn about them.  

  There was an audicious attack on the Russian bomber fleet by drones that flew out of lorries which led to this chess cartoon that got published in Private Eye.  However even as I type there is no end to that war even as the headlines are all about the Ukraine peace plan and another meeting with Trump.

13 Nectar Meetings

Summer was my most prolific for getting published and this one about bees and meetings was in Private Eye.  Occasionally when readers like a cartoon they will write in and ask for the original and the I'll redraw it for them in analogue media.  I have had a couple of redraws in the past, but for some reason this was the most redraw response I've had (so far) to a published cartoon so I got quite adept at recreating it with pen and acrylic inks.  

  The strange thing is you never know when you draw something what will resonate, sometimes you think its a sure-fire winner only for it to fall flat, other times you throw in something just to pad out a submission and its an unexpected hit.

14 Forgotten Fans

Do you remember the heatwaves of summer 2025 we went to Paris, France days before they shut the top of the Eiffel tower for health reasons.  I liked this cartoon at the end of the heatwave news cycle but as it entered the reject pile I submitted it to the New Cartoonist.

15 Super Cat

There was a new DCU movie about Superman which one of my superhero friends was very excited about but I never ended up seeing.  Not seeing something famous is no barrier to me drawing a cartoon about it and this one made Private Eye.

16 Conserve-ative Roommate

During a few weeks in September the UK news cycles were dominated by the fallout from the assassination on a US campus of Charlie Kirk, and it was hard to find topical stories to submit.  This cartoon was my unsuccessful attempt to draw something about a trend for more conservative (not the political party) students on campus.

17 Narnia Coats

Not every I submit is political, there tends to also be a seasonal vibe when I draw heatwave cartoons in the summer and in the autumn I draw about having to put on coats.  I've not had a successful year with coats mislaying several so now I have a coat rack of coats to rival the cupboard leading to Narnia.

18 National Trust Castle entry

The continued fragmentation and pay to win nature of social media meant I did fewer art challenges this year, but I did keep up with the weekly CCGB competitions as a discipline in drawing cartoons every weekend that aren't necessarily topical as occasionally they yield good ideas.  This is my best example of the year which I then submitted to the New Cartoonist.

19 French Prime Ministers

Some gags every topical cartoonist will do and this one about the turnover in French Prime Ministers appeared in various guises by different artists in various papers and magazines.  It's also a bit of a cheek UK cartoonists laughing at French turmoil when we had the year of Johnson, Truss and Rishi.

20 Riyadh Comedy festival

If you follow comedy then the story of 2025 was the Riyadh comedy festival of September/October when famous comedians accepted the Saudi money to go to the Middle East and do comedy as long as it didn't offend the hosts.

21 Andy Burnham Plot

The second half of 2025 the Labour Party's slide in the polls yielded Westminster bubble stories of plots by various Labour figures of plots of overthrow Starmer.  The two strongest plotters seem to be Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham who had the disadvantage of not being a MP.  A few years ago I did a Guy Fawkes plotters cartoon based on Liz Truss and a contemporary print of the plotters from the original plot which got published.  This is the first serial gag I've had published where I redrew it but with Andy Burnham as the focus of the plot.

22 Eye of Sauron

Some topical stories are so fleeting that they are almost worth not covering but Elon Musk made a remark on the Joe Rogan podcast about British people being hobbits and this was my rejected retort.

23 AI Advert

As we entered the season of Christmas advertising Coca-Cola boasted about using generative AI in their spooky Christmas advert, when they could presumably have used human creativity.  It is just one of a string of stories throughout the year where given the choice of commissioning a human artist and allowing an agency to use AI they chose to ride the trend of rising AI usage.  Despite companies investing billions in AI it hasn't yet proved an essential tool which means society still has a choice whether to give in to the tech bros, or limit its use to protect human creativity.

24 AI girlfriend

Of my Christmas rejected submissions this is the one I liked the most given it marries AI with generational awkwardness .

25 Not very Festive

Finally at the frantic end of the year I found myself late at night drawing a very elaborate gag that I was sure almost no-one would see.  Such is the life of a cartoonist most of your work goes into the reject bin, or gets washed away in the endless tide of social media increasingly buoyed by AI slop.  However the human urge to create, and that cautious optimism that perhaps something may connect we keep on drawing.