Rooftops, oil 20 x 15cm

Best friends, pastel 30 x 40 cm

Winter street, NYC, oil 20 x 15cm

Going home, oil 20 x 15cm

Trees behind a red plastic fence, oil 20 x 15cm

Wil, oil 20 x 15cm

The white rabbit escapes again, oil 20 x 15cm

Another cartoon from the distant past. Gary Larson has always been a big influence, ever since I first saw a cartoon of a kid bringing a head in a jar to show-and-tell as 'something I found on the beach'. I was about twelve and thought this was the funniest drawing I'd ever seen. Without Larson I think The Lost Thing would probably not exist.

Inside a potato chip research lab, felt-tip pen 1994.

Some more of my single-panel cartoons from the olden days. Who remembers Letratone?

Cleaning out some old stuff I found a collection of cartoons I began drawing when I was about 16. I was considering that I might be a cartoonist at the time, just trying to figure out any way I could make money by drawing – and like most teenagers, having no career plan at all. At one point I came very close to working as a cartoonist for The West Australian, and I sometimes wonder how that might have worked out. Later on I contributed a lot of spot cartoons to Pelican, the student paper of the University of Western Australia, and then to an arts paper called The Western Review. Although not particularly brilliant (sometimes not even very funny) I did learn a lot from drawing gag cartoons that helped me with other illustration, mainly the use of minimal content, concise captioning and framing. A joke only works if it's very economical and single panel cartoons really make you think carefully about composition.