Cult cartoonists Modern Toss celebrate 20 years with Brighton show

The festival will fill the venue’s three historic event spaces with stand-up, improv, clowning and workshops – plus the world premiere of Modern Toss’s 20th anniversary exhibition (October 24-27), ahead of a UK tour.

Free to attend, the exhibition will include token-operated art, inflatable fly balloons, stone sculptures and the opportunity to be sketched by the artists themselves in the Portrait Booth. Additional events include a late-night screening of classic Modern Toss films and new material, plus a Q&A with the duo’s own Jon Link

As Jon says: “We started in Brighton 20 years ago. We had various offices in Brighton and places of work and did a lot of exhibitions in Brighton. I moved about year ago. I was in Brighton for 23 years, quite a long time and I'm in London now but it still feels like Brighton is home.

“I had moved from London to Brighton 23 years ago and started commuting and that was really the start of it, a lot of the early Modern Toss cartoons having to do with trains and the anger of sitting on Thameslink trains! I've got lots of sketchbooks of angry cartoons and it helped! I can recommend it to anyone!

“Me and the guy that I work with both found ourselves with nothing to do at the time and we decided to make a collection of our cartoons printed up as a comic. We started taking them around the shops. It was back in the time when you could just walk into a shop with a bunch of comics and ask them to sell them. They would just take them off you, and things just built up that way. We had a lot of interest from the first comic and we got a cartoon strip from The Guardian from it and some TV companies started showing interest. But there was never any plan. It just happened. We brought this comic out and it just happened, but me and the guy I work with had been working together already for ten years at that point.I had already done a lot of work on magazines and so on and we had a working relationship already there. We had quite a lot of build-up to that point so really it is 30 years that we've been working together actually.”

Jon is excited about the anniversary exhibition: “It is our most ambitious. We are showing some of the work that we've done over the past 20 years and we're also showing the some of the work that we've done in the past three or four years. It's a healthy mixture of old and new and we've also got some very good interactive pieces which are token operated. And the nice thing about the exhibition is that it's free which is quite unusual. Ticket admissions are not something that I'm very keen on. I prefer the idea that it is free and then there are in-exhibition purchases you can make if you want to.”

Looking back over the 20 years, Jon admits: “The most pleasure probably is having avoided having a proper job for all that time. This has never felt like a job. And it's always been more of a natural organic cycle of just changing like the seasons. Sometimes you get a spring-like time when everything is growing and then other times it is just like winter where everything wilts and dies and then you get through winter and then it's another spring again. I think it's good to work like that, in that organic way. You should not be afraid of having fallow times and then being busier at some other times.”