Category

Format

Series

Top

Born: Melbourne, Australia 1972

Married to Wendy with one daughter Gaby (2)

Presently living in Brisbane, Australia.

John Cook is a full time cartoonist from Brisbane. In 1995, John and his wife Wendy created the Sev Wide Web site. While they published a variety of cartoons, it quickly became obvious the most popular was ?Sev Trek?, a parody of Star Trek. Without even realising it, they had stumbled on a huge niche - the online community of Star Trek fans. Over the next few years, the website expanded to include parodies of other sci-fi shows including Star Wars, the X-Files and Babylon 5. The site receives around half a million visitors per month and has given birth to a thriving online community calling themselves "Sevilians".

Currently, John is working on a 3D animated Sev Trek movie. Over the past year, the crew has grown to comprise people from all over the world, with contributors from USA, Canada, Brazil, Europe and Australian. One of the most exciting aspects of production has been the collaboration over the Internet between people from completely different parts of the globe. The story is based on the Sev Trek cartoon 'Pus in Boots' found on the Sev Trek website. It revolves around the handsome Commander Piker who is infested with a living, sentient pimple. He then grapples with the moral dilemma of whether to pop the zit or uphold their law of preserving new life. The plot thickens when the zit detaches and the crew must hunt it around the corridors of their ship.

The release date is late 2001. The movie length is equivalent to a one hour TV episode to be released on video and CD. You can find out latest details about the movie (such as downloading the trailer) or read the various Sev cartoons at: http://www.sev.com.au/

I created my first comic strip when I was 10 years old. The cartoon was called "Ronnie" with the drawing style heavily borrowing from Herge's Tintin (whose influence you can still see in my characters). With prodding from my mum, I took some cartoon samples to my local newspaper, "The Redland Times". I was delighted when they published two cartoons along with an article about the 'local kid aspiring to be a cartoonist'.

Throughout high school, I continued drawing (being drawn to Sergio Aragone style crowd scenes) but towards the end of high school, I somehow got it in my brain that I wanted to be a physicist. I spent the next 4 years studying black holes and relativity equations. Or to be more accurate, doodling cartoons in my notes about black holes and relativity equations. By the end of the 4th honours year, I was so burnt out on academia I rediscovered my early desire to draw and tell stories. I spent the next year developing a cartoon based on my experiences sharing a house with several other uni students. It was called 'The Pits' starring a slob, a ladies man and a nerd (can you guess which one was me). I sent a fairly crudely drawn version to a number of newspapers and unsurprisingly, none of them were interested.

At that point, I was on the verge of getting married and figured I better go get a real job. I managed to get a job in graphic design and worked there for several years. This taught me skills in desktop publishing and computer design which served me in good stead in the following years. I revamped The Pits and with a much slicker presentation, began sending it out to newspapers again. This time, I started to get a few nibbles and around half a dozen newspapers started running the strip.

At that point, I had filled up several notebooks with cartoon ideas. Not just The Pits but single gags, parodies of my favourite sci-fi shows and other weird stuff. The collection of single gags were starting to pile up so I began a second cartoon "Bent". I started sending samples out to newspapers and soon heard from a fellow cartoonist who alerted me to another single gag cartoon called "Bent Offerings". I wisely decided to change the title to "Twist" - there are no cartoons out with that title (to my knowledge anyway).

Again, I had moderate success with Twist, with about half a dozen newspapers running them. However, the overwhelming impression I got from editors were that they were squeezing out cartoons and replacing them with paying ad space. I got the sense that newspapers were a dwindling industry as far as cartoons were concerned and set my sights on what I saw was a growing market: the Internet.

In 1995, I created a web site called ?Sev Page? (my business name is Sevloid Art). I had no idea how to make money from the Internet so I set myself the goal of finding a business model for earning income from a cartoon website. I published The Pits and Twist and added three new cartoons: an original sci-fi comic "The Sevloid Chronicles" (starring the character Big Chin), a parody of The X-files "The Sev Files" and a Star Trek spoof "Sev Trek". In hindsight, it's not that surprising considering the demographics of the Internet community but my sci-fi parodies were instantly the most popular cartoons on my site.

Sev Trek started with a single cartoon satirizing The Next Generation. Called "Pus in Boots", it was about a zit on one of the characters that grew into a huge, sentient pimple. It got a lot of reaction online, mostly from grossed out Trekkers. Sev Trek really took off in early 1997 when I introduced a weekly competition where readers got to write their own punchline to a Sev Trek comic strip. These competitions grew to the point where I'm now running 5 new competitions every week with thousands of punchlines submitted daily. Fortunately, the readers read and rate the punchlines for me, saving me several hours of reading each day.

In 1998, I received an email from USA comedian Wally Fields. Wally specialised in voice impersonations, particularly of sci-fi characters and suggested we combine our talents to create sci-fi animation. While I loved the idea, I'm a dreadfully lazy person - drawing 5 cartoons a week is enough work, let alone 24 frames per second! I put the call out on my website for animators and heard back from Andrew Simpson, a 3D animator who happened to live in my home town. We worked together to create a short 60 second Sev Trek animation which we published on the website. It took only a few days to put together. Andrew has a talent for producing animation in very short time periods.

Flushed with excitement, we moved onto a second project, a 90 second parody of the newly released Star Wars: Episode 1 trailer. This production was a little more ambitious and it took us 3 months to put it all together. We played it at sci-fi conventions and received great reaction from audiences and the online community. After that, I decided to have a little break from animation - juggling cartooning and animation was exhausting (I don't multi-task very well).

But Andrew was keen to start something else so eventually, we decided to create an animated version of my very first Sev Trek story, Pus in Boots. We planned to create a longer story around 10 minutes long, so I started fleshing out action sequences and space battles. The story grew to the point where we decided to make it a half hour TV episode (eg - 22 minutes long). Yet as I kept working on the script, the story grew and grew till we ended up with more than 30 minutes worth of action. So we reshaped it into a 1 hour TV episode (44 minutes of animation).

2 very long years later, we finally completed production and released the film on video in May 2002. The finished product ended up much better than I could've imagined at the start of production. We gathered a team of eager and talented crew members who all added extra dimensions to the film. Now we've just signed a distribution deal, with the plan to sell the video in stores across the world. We're also beginning production of a DVD version. It's exciting times and the hardest question is deciding what to do next.

(c) 2002-2005 Andydrew Pty Ltd