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People old enough to remember the 1980s underground comic strip 'Sloppy' - which appeared in the alternative publication Learn and Teach - or 'Selatsa', a strip featured in the Bloemfontein newspaper The Friend, might have wondered what has happened to gonzo cartoonist Mogorosi Motshumi since those creations of his.

They'll be pleased to know that this struggling artist is back at the drawing board, teaching himself new tricks and employing them in his latest project; an autobiographical epic which he expects to complete next year. In it, he narrates his struggle under apartheid and since, including his challenges with substance abuse and Aids.THE CAPE TIMES' Janet Heard discovered him in Cape Town recently and extracted a rare interview with this leading apartheid era cartoonist, who is clearly not done yet.  

TWENTY YEARS ago South Africa's favourite comic strip made its first appearance in the Weekly Mail. Its purpose was to record the absurdities of a community huddled together on the Southern tip of Africa as it grappled with the most dramatic social change it had ever known.

Apartheid was being dismantled around it, and the community's members faced new hope and new challenges. Enter Madam and Eve, a conscientious middle class woman and her wily maid servant; as good a representation of the country's 40 million populace as you'll ever get to fit within the confines of a comic strip frame.

BOTSWANA AFRICA'S BEST PLACED, SOMALIA WORST IN WORLD.Africa maintained its reputation for corruption in the latest World Corruption Rankings released by Transparency International recently. No African country made it amongst the twenty least corrupt in the world, while Somalia has the dubious honour of being the world's most corrupt. The majority of African countries can be found towards the dishonourable end of the index, ensuring lots of material for editorial cartoonists across the continent. [Read further for a full list of African rankings]

AS SA'S FIRST EXCLUSIVELY DIGITAL EDITORIAL CARTOONIST

JERM, the political cartoonist who was famously fired last month from his government aligned newspaper "for being too political", has bounced back, landing himself a position as editorial cartoonist for Eyewitness News (EWN). His cartoons will appear twice weekly on the news service's website, making it the first news site in South Africa to feature original content by an editorial cartoonist, and breaking new ground for JERM, a pioneer of digital cartooning in South Africa. The deal will also bring editorial cartoons into the radio space, providing EWN's radio partners such as 702 and Cape Talk a rallying point around which issues of the day could be discussed.