Zooniverse would have looked very different if an illustrator, six years my senior, hadn't photocopied my entire body of work up to that point. I was 18 and so painfully shy that I sat quietly all day as the professional artist, a person I deeply admired, stole my style one page at a time. I was too polite to protest, too shocked to speak, swallowing my silent panic as I watched him copy the equivalent of two phone books in thickness, of all of my Zooniverse designs and concepts up to that point. The next illustrations that appeared printed in a glossy magazine, stamped with his credit and signature, were in the style I had painstakingly fostered through my teenage years. If I were to use my own style again I would be seen as an imitator of him. Below is Lokki in the Zooniverse style that never happened ...
As you can see, I was myself a derivative, heavily influenced by Vaughn Bode and Rene Goscinny (Asterix). The professional Illustrator had actually done me a favor. I shed my artistic skin and let him take the style as his with my sincere blessing. I'm happy to report we are old friends to this day, and I'm sure he is unaware of what he took from me and what I sacrificed.
I had to start again, and decided to throw my creative stone further out than I was comfortable so that no one could follow me, at least not in the 1980's. I learned to risk and to keep designing until I felt uneasy, as soon as a drawing went so far that I started hearing a voice say, "I can't do that!". I knew that I had arrived at the Zooniverse. Every character, and incidental in the comic series was an "I can't do that!" moment for me. Risk had become my standard. Below is a page of unused character designs, now aged 20, each night ended with me curled up in bed inventing pages of characters.
This page was drawn while I lived with other cartoonists at a studio called Ghaspp my bedroom wall was shared by Mandate, a gay disco in St.Kilda. Even with earplugs would go to sleep with the throbbing base permeating every fiber of my mattress. Someone was having a good time and it was never studious little me.
