The Plymouth Herald sent in their cartoonist to illustrate the Southampton vs. Plymouth game to get the visual story after the Southampton Football Club banned press photography – insisting they purchase the photos from a signal agency. The cartoonist, Chris Robinson, is a city historian and Herald contributor.
You can see some of Chris’ illustrations on the Plymouth website.
Brilliant! Somebody at the paper actually knows something about newspaper history.
The story wasn’t clear as to whether or not they actually printed the cartoons, though, or if they caved and used the “official” photos.
Excellent stuff. The Watford Observer used to have cartoonist Terry Challis cover every Watford game until his death recently in a more comic strip style. There’s some samples here:
http://bhappy.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/terry-challis/
As a sports cartoonist myself, I absolutely love this. A few sports cartoonists in the 1930’s actually had drawing boards mounted in the car so they could draw on the way back to the paper after the game and to meet deadline. This is cool. thanks Alan!
In a somewhat related story, Dayton Daily News illustrator John Hancock was sent to cover a prison riot in Lima (after a long stand-off inside the prison). He was taking pictures outside the facility, so they detained him, took him into the prison and took the film from his camera (yeah, several years ago). What they didn’t realize was they just gave him access to the whole inside of the prison from which to illustrate the story … and he did. 😉