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Cartoonist James Kemsley is the talent behind Ginger Meggs, Australia's most popular and widely published comic strip.
by Don Norris When it comes to quintessential Aussie cartoon characters, none is more quintessential than Ginger Meggs. The freckle-faced redhead kid with a larrikin streak has been a staple of Australian newspaper cartoon sections since making his debut in 1921. But, according to James Kemsley, Ginger is now well on his way to becoming an international comics megastar. "It has been the most popular comic strip character in Australian history", says Kemsley. "It is syndicated to 85 publications in Australia and it is published in Hong Kong, South Africa, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Mexico, Venezuela, Guatemala, Vanuatu, Fiji, Thailand and India. It's also published in a couple of minor papers in America and in England and is about to start in Holland and Norway."
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Although he sold his first cartoon in 1966, Kemsley began cartooning full time when he took on responsibility for Ginger Meggs in 1983. He's something of a traditionalist in his work habits. "I still use pen and ink", he says, "I could, I suppose, use a Wacom tablet or something, but I am one of these old fashioned artists who likes having to scrub his fingers every night and get the ink off them! I still feel the weight of a pen going onto a piece of paper and splattering everywhere as what I am all about. "
Nevertheless, ruling up a huge white board, penciling in the strip and carefully lettering the dialogue and colouring the whole lot in, is a time-consuming task. Cue modern technology. "One day I had to do something, so I scanned something in, cleaned it up and I thought 'this is something that will work.' I put together a strip from scans. I would scan in an illustration and clean it up in Adobe® Photoshop®. I found it very easy to clean up and there was the great advantage of being able to position it on the page and move it exactly to where my mind's eye was thinking about. You often draw and wish you could move it over, but you've already committed the ink to the page."
Lettering a strip is the bane of many a cartoonist's life. But Kemsley says that thanks to Photoshop, things are now much easier. Having to re-work a panel because he forgot a word in a caption is a thing of the past. "Photoshop 5.5 thankfully brought back the italics and the bold, so you can do all sorts of effects on it. If you make a mistake, or something is too wordy, or too long, you can just edit it down as you go."
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 Copyright © Jimera Pty. Ltd. and James Kemsley.
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| Ginger Meggs is published in Spanish and Portuguese, but some of its concepts are purely Australian. | |
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While Photoshop makes re-lettering Ginger Meggs for various overseas markets a simple task, Kemsley also frequently turns to Adobe® Illustrator® for onomatopoeia. "If I want to use the word 'Kapow' or 'Whack' -- I like making up my own onomatopoeia -- I will go into Illustrator, type it in and then jig it around and distort it letter by letter and drag it in and drop it in." The time savings can be significant, he explains. " I can spend about an hour and a half drawing an onomatopoeia, but I can go onto Illustrator and in a matter of a minute and a half get exactly the same effect. " Kemsley also uses Illustrator to produce any logos he needs and to devise various graphical elements. "Occasionally, if I'm doing Meggs and I've finished all the drawing", he explains, "and I think it needs a ball bouncing off a wall or a character should be holding a book, I'll very quickly draw that in Illustrator and place it on top of the strip." Kemsley has no intention of giving up the use of ink and paper, but nor is he about to give up his computer based tools. "I really enjoy using the Adobe products and they have made my life incredibly easy compared to what it was. If I only used the facility to put the type in and nothing else, I would think it was well worthwhile. The bonus of being able to colour the strip, clean it up and give it a crisp image and then export to people in any format they want is just amazing. I do 365 strips a year, and if it wasn't for Photoshop, I think it would have been restricted to simply a Sunday strip or a daily strip -- I couldn't do both." Read Ginger Meggs on http://www.hinet.net.au/~meggs His friends often tell Don Norris that he's a cartoon character trapped in a freelance writer's body. |
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