Comicon Advent Calendar Day 23: Giles’ Christmas

We’re right at the end of the Comicon Advent Calendar this year, with just one more day to go after this one. So, Merry Christmas to you all and enjoy…

Carl Giles was a British cartoonist. But that’s way, way too simple. He was brilliant, a genius, one of the finest cartoonists of several generations. He was never political, not in the way we think of political cartooning. What he was was a cartoonist who knew people, knew how to observe people, knew how to get a laugh out of the world and the characters around him. And, in doing that, he became one of the finest social documentary cartoonists of the 20th Century in my mind.

I make no apologies here that this is the second time I’ve done Giles as part of the Advent Calendar, first appearing in 2021 here. Giles being as brilliant and as prolific as he was, there’s so many cartoons to choose from with a Christmas theme.

He’s also one of my four favourite comics of Christmas, so yes, I’ll gladly do Giles once more and gladly tell you where that love comes from. (As for the other three favourite comics of Christmas, they come in tomorrow.)

So, my longstanding love of Giles’ cartoons comes from my Dad and from Christmas. Every single year when I was growing up, Dad would always have the Giles collection as one of his presents to read while Mom was making Christmas dinner. And then, after we’d all done the turkey, it was my turn to open up the collection. These collections brought together the years’ worth of his work or, in later years, reprints of his work, and they were in turns hilarious, enthralling, and incredibly educational about post-war Britain.

That’s Giles’ greatest skill really. Sure, he’s an outstanding draughtsman and has an eye for a great gag that’s second to none. But it was that way he had of capturing the moments of the day, the important events around the world or in the UK and putting it through a filter of what your everyday man and woman were thinking that really made him the genius he was.

Every single character here is just perfectly done, creating a rich portrait of a world-gone-by, a world that we all too often see through the lens of ‘proper’ history. But Giles’ history is just as real, just as valid. It just happens to be hilariously funny as well.

Carl Giles (1916-1995), a genius cartoonist whose work lives on. At some point this Christmas, when we go see Dad, the conversation will, as it always does, turn to Giles… so I’d like to thank the old man for giving me that right now and I’ll be sure to tell him in person.

For more things Giles – the Giles Cartoons – A Celebration is an excellent resource and tribute to the man.

These are all the b&w Christmas cartoons – there were many absolutely brilliant colour cartoons for the covers to the collections, front and back telling a perfect gag – and the Christmas ones of those I covered last time.

Or at least I thought I had. When I was getting images for this, I happened upon The Political Cartoon Society’s Carl Giles page and saw this…

That’s the unused and rejected cover for the 1964 collection cover. I had never seen it before and it’s just magnificent.

I can only imagine how royally furious Giles was when this got rejected for a lack of festive spirit. Absolute rot of course, this is EXACTLY how I remember Christmas and the divisions of the generations.

Again, as with all these colour covers, the front and the back are a beautifully done, incredibly detailed gag. Here it’s that generational division I mentioned as the pretty young things have Dad and Grandma annoyed on the front only to turn the tables on the back cover as Dad and Grandma knock out their own Christmas tune, clearing everyone out.

And it’s also a perfect chance to blow the images up and show you just how good an artist Giles was, just how good he was at selling an image and making a gag work… it is quite wonderful to see.