Cartoonist, commercial artist and TV animator, worked in a variety of jobs in Australia and New Zealand, including being a greaser in a sugar mill, a chain-man for a surveyor, a barman, a lighting hand at the old Tivoli Theatre in Sydney, a boilermaker’s offsider, a builder’s labourer and a volunteer fireman, before he became a full-time artist. His first art job was as a commercial artist and retoucher of photographs for an American company in Sydney. Then he moved to TV animation during its early days in a primitive studio near Botany Bay from which he moved into advertising, doing freelance cartoons for trade magazines as a sideline. He did a cover for the old pink Bulletin of a tortoise biting a postman (“Animals just don’t seem to like him”), published 27 April 1960, and a series of 'Rare Australian Fauna’ posters (e.g. 'The One-Eared, Ten-Toed Bludger’ and 'The Horny Wash Bison’), using sketches he had originally drawn for a TV comedy sketch. He is best known, however, for the outback comic strip 'The Warrumbunglers’, which he has been drawing since 1967 (when it appeared in Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph ) and for the pseudo-colonial convict strip 'On The Rocks’, published in the Sydney Sun/Sun-Herald from 1974 to c.2001.
Emerson ended his autobiographical notes (Rae p.28) with the comments:
“The future of comic strips that are recognisably Australian does not look bright. Australia has always had a reputation for producing good black and white artists. Today much of the best talent is working on political cartoons, with the Australian press putting less emphasis than before on strips and gag drawings.
“With more and more overseas material, both print and especially T.V., flooding in, I hope we are not in danger of losing that Australian flavour which was so evident in past years. As the local market for comic strips shrinks because of fewer newspapers, it becomes even more necessary to try to get your work syndicated overseas. This in turn leads to the development of an “international” look and further erodes the Australian flavour.”
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2007
