Early in my cartooning career, I had a notebook where I'd doodle any weird idea that came in my head. A large proportion of these ideas were science fiction parodies, mostly Star Trek. At the beginning I did it mostly for my own enjoyment - there was no practical way I could publish sci-fi parody. At the time my cartoons were only being published in newspapers and science fiction was a little too special interest to be used by them. Back then when the Internet was still young, I was only published in print newspapers.


After I created my cartoon website, I thought it would be a good opportunity to publish some of my other cartoons so I drew two new cartoons: spoofs of Star Trek (Sev Trek) and the X-Files (Sev Files). These quickly became the most popular cartoons on my website with sci-fi fans coming out of the woodworks in droves. I began to think maybe I should draw more of this sci-fi stuff. I started drawing a range of cartoon parodies, spoofing Star Wars, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, anything I could get my hands on. Then I extended it to fantasy with parodies of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Buffy (and recently, the Narnia Chronicles).


Before long, I began the weekly Sev Space caption contest. I'd draw a single panel cartoon with the final speech bubble missing its punchline. Readers would submit punchlines and at the end of the week, a winner would be chosen and placed into the cartoon. We still run the same weekly contest, with over a decade's worth of weekly contests now archived on the website. Once the Sev Space comic strip got started, I opened it up for use on other people's web sites (a way to spread the cartoon on the web). That was when Sev Space really exploded. Suddenly a lot more people were visiting the site and a community began to build around the website.


Currently, Sev Space continues to thrive online as well as being published in newspapers throughout Australia (and one paper in Fiji).