So my heart sinks looking at a Private Eye cartoon

Spirits are so low today I'm finding it really difficult to get going. I'm wondering why I even bother drawing cartoons. In a way, it feels like my creativity is continually stifled. I started out, a number of years ago, writing novels and I would have had one published – a light-hearted satirical skit loosely based on Jacob Rees Mogg – if the publisher hadn't been gobbled up by Harper Collins. I still write novels and have 90,000 unfinished words sitting here on this computer. Except I know there's so little chance of getting anything published that I might as well dump the manuscript in the local canal, myself with it… So I reduced the scale on my ambition. I wrote spoof letters and had one book published. I have a second book finished, even better than the first, but I can't find a publisher interested... So I reduced the scale of my ambitions again. I started to draw cartoons and comic strips, thinking if I condense my wit, I might have more chances to be published and earn some small income. Yet even that is proving fruitless. I submit cartoons to Private Eye and every one has been rejected. It's depressing but, as Tom Waits would say: 'that's the business we're in'. Rejection is a chance to revise and edit. As Nietzsche puts it: 'That which does not kill us makes us stronger.' When I met Steadman, he said 'rework your failures'. Rejection should make me question my work. Are my cartoons funny enough? Are they drawn well enough? How can I improve? I ask myself all those questions daily. I struggle through doubt, confusion, and monstrous self-loathing. Why can't I just find myself a humdrum job and be happy? Yet the spirits are never more batter than when something like this happens. Yesterday I bought Private Eye and I saw this cartoon on page 13.

And this is what I submitted to Private Eye back in the New Year when it was quickly rejected.

It's the same joke done different ways, different styles, but that is always bound to happen when cartoonists address the same material and same ugly world. Was mine submitted first or second? I can't tell. Is it better or worse? I guess it's for others to judge. Mine is less 'on the nose', as they say, but perhaps too detailed for a single panel gag. All I know is that it again makes me wonder just why the hell I even bother getting up in the morning...