The 2025 Galway Cartoon Festival was an amazing experience…

Above all we want to thank the artists who gave us work to show here in Galway. You, and your work, are what we do this for.

Chosen Artists

• Cartoon Trail
• Danse Macabre
• General Mayhem
• Tarraing É I nGaeilge

Our Sponsors and Partners

We also want to thank everyone who got involved. Our wonderful guests especially, who taught us so much. But also the City of Galway, which gave us amazing support, and all our other sponsors both public and commercial.

Sponsors

Partners

• Radisson RED Galway
• PorterShed
• Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop
• Áras Éanna
• Town Hall Theatre
• Cava Bodega
• Sheridans Cheesemongers
• iSupply
• Sub-City Comics
• Baboró International Arts Festival for Children Architecture at the Edge
• Eyre Square Shopping Centre
• Ça Presse
• Galway Mechanics Institute
• Galway Cider Co.
• Kinlay Hostel

And Finally, a Personal Thank You to:

• Jimmy McGuire at Tigh Neachtain
• John Mannion and the Latin Quarter
• Declan Varley and Peadar Mac Fhlannchadha at the Galway Advertiser
• Anthony, Cadhla, Oonagh and Aoife at PorterShed
• Charlie, Vinny, Méabh and Noreen from Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop
• Fergal McGrath from the Town Hall Theatre
• Niall McNelis
• Donal Casey
• Frank Monaghan at Architecture at the Edge
• Aislinn at Barbaró International Arts Festival for Children
• Tigh Ned, Inis Oírr
• Olive and Áine at the primary and secondary schools on Inis Oírr respectively
• Áine at Claregalway secondary school
• Ciarán Tierney at Gaeltacht an Eachréidh
• JP from Cava Bodega
• Seamus from Sheridans
• Jenny at RTÉ Supporting the Arts
• Louis at iSupply
• Frank and Aisling from Kinlay Galway City Hostel
• Joe O’Shaughnessy
• Justin McCarthy
• Stéphanie Muchint at the French Embassy, Dublin
• Maura in Hillside B&B
• Frank McNally at The Irish Times
• Madeline and Alba at Galway Radisson RED
• Sub-City Comics Galway
• Gary at Galway Cider Co.
• Thomas Dillon Jewellers
• Nelly, Bernie Keogh Art, Geraghty’s Menswear
• Michael Belton at the Galway Mechanics Institute
• Allan Cavanagh
• Our amazing volunteers

Go Raibh Míle Maith Agaibh Go Léir

Help Us Build A Wall To Break Down Barriers!

Send us cartoons about fundamental freedoms – we’ll print them giant-size and paste them on a public wall

The right to a free press, the right to vote, the right to strike, the right to education, the right to health, the right to free expression – these and other freedoms are increasingly under threat around the world.

To celebrate and vindicate such basic freedoms, we will be enlarging cartoons to giant size and pasting them on a prominent wall in Galway.

We’re looking for cartoons about essential rights and freedoms from two groups:

1. Professional cartoonists from around the world.

2. Children and schools around Iereland.

Please email your entries to:

info@galwaycartoonfestival.ie

Or post them to:

Please get yours to us as soon as possible!

About Freedom Walls

It began as the shared dream of some European NGOs – Europeans Without Borders, Cartooning for Peace, Reporters Without Borders – but soon resonated with young volunteers, many from underprivileged neighbourhoods outside Paris, who were inspired to create a wall of cartoons celebrating the vital role of a free press.

Following their example, we will cover walls in cartoons to raise awareness of important freedoms. Contributors draw on paper or send us images, we print these enlarged and paste them up on two walls – one for professional cartoonists from many countries, the other for local and visiting children.

Our Month-Long Project

This project is undertaken in cooperation with the Architecture At The Edge and the Baboró International Arts Festival for Children, two festivals running consecutively with ours.

Beginning on Culture Night, it will continue through all three and reach completion a month later.

Wall Locations

Freedom Wall: Lower Merchants Rd, on vacant houses leading to Pálás Cinema

Children’s Freedom Wall: Eyre Square Shopping Centre, opposite Mediaeval wall

Paste-Up Events

Come along and help us stick things to walls!

1.00pm, Sunday 5th October: Freedom Wall, Lower Merchants Road

3.30pm, Wednesday 8th October: Children’s Freedom Wall, Eyre Square Centre

Culture Night Children’s Cartoon Workshop

Charlie Byrnes Bookshop, Friday 19th September, 7-8.30pm

See All the Events in This Year’s Festival

DAY-BY-DAY SCHEDULE

Fáilte!

According to the recently late, unceasingly great Tom Lehrer, satire died when they gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize. We wanted to be sure, so we called a conference. Cartoonists from France and around the world will be asking: Are We Still Charlie?

Offsetting this sober reflection, a wild bouquet of comic-book brilliance: Pioneer of the ’60s underground Gilbert Shelton will be in conversation with British (Tube?) artist Hunt Emerson, while Andy Leuenberger will bring the Berlin metro. Brendan McCarthy of – among many other things – Judge Dredd fame will show us his stuff while Lucie Arnoux takes up our residency and gives another great workshop.

Other returning favourites include the wonderful Cristina Sampaio, plus the usual crew of reprobates including Graeme Keyes, Jim Cogan, Harry Burton, Dean Patterson and Tom Mathews. Leading American political cartoonist Jeff Danziger pays a surprise visit, while our featured Irish artist will be Ian Knox who for decades has ploughed the hard furrow of Northern Ireland politics. Our theme exhibition, Danse Macabre, explores the darker side of humour, and we have a whole extra mini-festival on Inis Oírr!

It’s our biggest and best yet. For this we want to thank all our sponsors, in particular Galway City Council who have given us tremendous support, not to mention our guests, the team who worked so hard to pull all this together, and you – for being exactly where you are at this moment, reading this very sentence. I commend you on your excellent life choices.

Richard Chapman

Artistic Director

Lieutenant Dangerous

PorterShed a Dó, Market Street

3:00pm, Sunday 5th October. Free Entry

Born in 1943, Jeff Danziger was drafted into the US Army during the Vietnam War. On getting out, he immediately became a cartoonist. With a career stretching back over fifty years, he is among the best known of American political satirists.

He has published eleven books of cartoons, one novel and a war memoir, and is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He worked at the New York Daily News (1982-86) and the Christian Science Monitor (1986-96), where he was twice a Pulitzer finalist.

In addition to political cartoons syndicated to US papers, his illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times, and The American Prospect.

Come to our 2025 Programme Launch and be first to hear Galway City Arts Officer Ruth Mulhern announce the fabulous events we have in store!

As usual, we’re accepting public submissions to several exhibitions. Three of these are now open:

1 – The Themed Show

By the time the Festival comes it will be autumn, the great seasonal change we have celebrated since ancient times as Samhain, or Hallowe’en.

So we’re looking for work with a twist of the seasonal and supernatural, the liminal and grotesque. Witches, monsters, mythologies. Life and death itself.

The title of this exhibition?

Danse Macabre

Let’s danse!

2 – General Mayhem

Also known as “that show with no rules”. This is the one for cartoons of all kinds, satirical or surreal, topical or timeless.

3 – Tarraing É I nGaeilge

Tá Féile cartúin na Gaillimhe ag cuartú Cartúin as Gaeilge! Déanfar taispeantas ar ghach iontrál a ghlacfhainn an Fhéile, i nGaillimh agus ar Inis Oírr. Spriocdáta ná an 30ú Lúnasa.

“Draw It In Irish“, our exhibition specifically for cartoons in that language – the only one of its kind in the world today. Works selected for Tarr­aing é i nGaeilge will be shown both in Galway City and on Inis Oírr in the Aran Islands.

The deadline for all our exhibitions is:

August 30 2025

Submission Details:

• Submissions are welcome from anyone, anywhere.
• You can send as many as you like.
• Original drawings and artist-signed prints should be sent to:

Richard Chapman
The Galway Cartoon Festival
17 Middle St
Galway H91 XY60
Ireland

• If you wish to sell an original drawing or signed print, please state the price you are asking for it.
• Digital submissions should be sent, as 300 dpi jpegs please, to: 

info@galwaycartoonfestival.ie

• Any sales of digital submissions will go towards the costs of the Festival.
• With all submissions, please include a little biographical information.
• Submitted cartoons may be used in publicity materials for the festival. They will be credited to the artist.

The selected images will be exhibited throughout the Festival, as well as on our website

Still Charlie After All These Years

Among the events that led to the creation of the Galway Cartoon Festival, one of the most important was the murder of five cartoonists and seven others at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris. A lot of our initial motivation was to do something positive and good for cartooning, show that the art was important and valued.

And so, ten years on, we feel the need to mark the anniversary of those tragic events. Not with mourning, but with a celebration: Of the lives that were lived right up until that day, of their humour and art, and of the spirit of satire that inspired them.

So we are holding a “cartoon seminar”, an illustrated conference, bringing together cartooning talent from Ireland and other countries – France in particular of course – as well as writers, academics, and others with an interest in visual satire, to look to the future.

We are receiving generous support in this project from Galway city via the CAIRDE fund, as well as from the Embassy of France in Ireland and the Galway French Consular Agency.

Introducing Ça Presse!

Ça Presse in action

Our partners in this will be Ça Presse, a media and information education association with a particular focus on press cartooning. Founded in 2019 in Lyon, it works with adults and school groups to help them understand the media and develop critical judgment.

Thanks to them, we already have some very significant guests lined up for the conference in October:

Camille Besse was born in 1983 and grew up in Paris. After studying for seven years she became a graphic designer, and began her career as a cartoonist at Charlie Hebdo.

Her other drawing credits include Causette, L’Huma Dimanche, Le Pèlerin, Marianne, and Journal des Activités Sociales.

She also works as a comic artist and animates TV cartoons.

Thibaut Soulcié is a French cartoonist and comic strip artist. Born in the Loir-et-Cher region in 1983, Thibaut grew up in a farming family before studying art and graphics in Paris and Strasbourg.

His work has appeared in many media outlets including 28 Minutes (Arte), La Revue Dessinée, Fluide Glacial, Télérama, Marianne, Fakir, CQFD, L’Équipe, and more recently L’Est Républicain and Médiapart, for whom he draws sports coverage in cartoons. Other work includes Les Supères with Jorge Bernstein and Homo Politicus with writer Nena.

Coralina Picos is the founder and director of Ça Presse.

“We would like it [the future of press cartoons] to be a bright future, but it doesn’t necessarily look rosy because there are many newspaper editorial offices that don’t publish images, and there’s no artistic direction.

“That’s why we partner with newspapers like Libération or Marianne, which have artistic directors and really give cartooning a prominent place.”

And it’s only beginning. Check back often for more exciting guest news!

Announcing the opening of submissions to the 9th Galway Cartoon Festival!

It seems a long way off right now, with Galway’s summer rain still splashing happily on our heads, but by the time the Festival comes it will be autumn, the great seasonal change we have celebrated since ancient times as Samhain, or Hallowe’en.

So this time we explore the mysterious, the seasonal and supernatural, the liminal and grotesque. Witches, monsters, mythologies. Life and death itself.

The title of this exhibition?

Danse Macabre

While we are still open to all kinds of cartoons, work that fits with this theme will have a better chance of being chosen.

The deadline for this and for all our exhibitions is:

August 30 2025

Submission Details:

• Submissions are welcome from anyone, anywhere.
• You can send as many as you like.
• Original drawings and artist-signed prints should be sent to:

Richard Chapman
The Galway Cartoon Festival
17 Middle St
Galway H91 XY60
Ireland

• If you wish to sell an original drawing or signed print, please state the price you are asking for it.
• Digital submissions should be sent, as 300 dpi jpegs please, to: 

info@galwaycartoonfestival.ie

• Any sales of digital submissions will go towards the costs of the Festival.
• With all submissions, please include a little biographical information.
• Submitted cartoons may be used in publicity materials for the festival. They will be credited to the artist.

The selected images will be exhibited throughout the Festival, as well as on our website