BeeHive > BeeLines > A Cartoon History of A-Day

A Cartoon History of A-Day

It’s difficult to believe, I know, but A-Day is finally with us. How was it for you? Me, I’m just glad to have made it I suppose.

Looking back on all the twists and turns (and U-turns) that led us to where we are now I was wondering just how you would explain it all to someone who wasn’t there. I mean, who’d believe most of it? But I wanted to do something on the BeeHive website to mark such a momentous occasion and I guess loads of other commentators will publish their definitive guides to A-Day and everything, but that’s not what the BeeHive’s about really. It’s different and I don’t want it to be normal. I wouldn’t be comfortable with it if it was.

A friend said to me the other day “Why don’t you just stick a load of the Planet Stakeholder cartoons on a BeeLine? They sum it all up fairly well!” I thought about that for a while and started to re-read some of the old strips from four or five years ago and it did bring it all back to me. So, that’s what this BeeLine will do and maybe it will bring it all back home to you too. Who knows?

I’ve been drawing the Planet Stakeholder strip for Pensions Week magazine for over eight years now and obviously A-Day issues have cropped up a fair bit in the last few years, so a compilation of some of those might well do the trick. Ms Bruun and I have been through the archives on the BeeHive cartoon gallery and have selected the ones we reproduce here. There were loads we decided to leave out, not because we didn’t like them, but because we would have ended up republishing the whole lot if we hadn’t edited plenty of them out. This isn’t the only A-Day selection we could have come up with, but we think it’s pretty representative.

David Emery, my co-writer on this strip, said to me once that he was becoming afraid that some of the things we dreamt up as jokes for Planet Stakeholder were actually turning out to be true. He was pretty much freaked out by that when our strip started to accurately predict many of the twists and turns of the A-Day story in particular. But we carried on with it nonetheless, even though I’ve been keenly aware that what I draw in the strip on a Sunday night as a joke could quite easily become a fact by the following Friday. It’s something I’ve just had to get used to.

So anyway, if you’re ready for a trip down A-Day memory lane here are eighty or so of those cartoons in approximate chronological order starting from some time back in 2002. And remember, you won’t get this from any other pension website (although there are probably really good reasons for that that aren’t obvious to me. I know that…)