#PFAD3: Rooneytoons!

The lighter side of drawing former Manchester United and England heavyweight Wayne Rooney.

I’ve done countless Wayne Rooney features and illustrations over the years since he first exploded onto the Premier League stage as an insanely-talented teenager. But as often as I’ve treated him with gravitas in illustration, I’ve been just as likely to lampoon him in cartoon!

I think my 2006 World Cup package was the first time I featured him. This was syndicated to various newspapers around the world with The Daily Mirror taking it for the U.K. He was also included in my packages for the 2010 and 2014 tournaments.

I featured Rooney’s life story in the football version of my “Biographic” series, which ran in papers and magazines as far afield as Britain and The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. Beyond that, there were my features on Manchester United and England that ran in the likes of Match and Match of the Day magazines that also featured him. But as far back as 2008, I was also giving him regular cartoon grief!

When Shoot! magazine … perhaps the U.K.’s most well-known football publication and one I was associated with throughout most of the 1990s … was relaunched in February of 2008 after a brief hiatus, each issue featured my cartoon series “Premier League High.” The premise of the series was a world where soccer’s superstars were schoolboys and their teachers were the sport’s top managers. My recurring cast of characters included Joey Barton as a prank-playing bully, Cristiano Ronaldo as his perennial target, Carlos Tevez as a feral force of nature and Rooney as a goodies-gorging greedyguts.

Sadly, the return of Shoot! was short-lived and the publication was sold off before the year was out. That was my cue to jump ship to a rival magazine, the BBC’s Match of the Day, the companion publication to the weekly soccer TV show. They put a lot of work my way, both the photo-realistic stuff and the humorous material, but the scripts were all done in-house by their editorial staff, which is not my preferred way of working. However, it did give me the opportunity to regularly torment the likes of Wayne, as you can see from the couple of examples shown below. (I worked from scripts provided by MOTD and they added the text at their end, so I’m afraid you’ll have to guess what the characters are saying!)

Within a year or so I’d moved on, and started contributing to Match magazine for the first time in over two decades, having had my own weekly series in the mag in the mid-1980s. I did quite a few features for Match on my return. They ran my “Biographic” series, but all the other cartoons and comic strips I did for them was purely as an illustrator, working from their scripts. As I mentioned, I don’t really enjoy working that way, as I prefer to write my own material, but they were a very good client and they put a lot of work my way. Besides the full-page “Moneybags United” comic, in which a struggling club was bought out by a rich Middle Eastern potentate, there were a revolving series of three-panel strips – one of which was “Wayne’s Brain”:

As circulations have dwindled, so have the budgets for luxury items like cartoonists and illustrators, so I don’t work nearly as much for soccer publications as I once did. However, there are lots of other avenues to explore … and in 2018, I staged my “Playing For a Draw” exhibition, exploring the history of football illustration, comics, cartoons and collectibles, at the National Football Museum in Manchester. To commemorate the three-month exhibition, a coloring book was produced to sell in the museum’s gift shop. The book was a joint collaboration with my son, the award-winning cartoonist Luke McGarry, and it gave him the opportunity to continue the family tradition of lampooning the legends:

By 2018, I had conscripted Luke to work on my regular packages for major tournaments, which now gives editors the choice of running the material with my photo-realistic illustrations or Luke’s irreverent caricatures. His mono version of Rooney was adapted from one such package.

My most recent depictions of Wayne are included in a series of “Trivquiz” books I authored with Pitch Publishing, signed copies of which are available on my site.
Hint! Hint!

Finally, rather than keep it all in the family I thought I’d leave you with a few alternate versions of Wayne Rooney from some of the friends I’ve made in the field of football comics and cartoons. In order, I present the Wayne work of Stanley Chow, the mighty Viz comic, Dan Leydon and Steve Gulbis. If you don’t buy my stuff, follow the links and buy some of theirs!

By the way, here’s an online comic telling the Wayne Rooney life story from back in 2021: