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Born in Adelaide in October 1955, Jon is a cartoonist, writer and actor, who has escaped from the grind of full-time secondary teaching in search of artistic recognition. Still searching for that elusive pot of gold, his brushes with bureaucracy inspired Ratrace, that rodent-inhabited world of bureau-rats, and his experiences as a secondary English teacher helped spawn the notion of Purr-Fect Grammar.

As a kid in Primary School, he was forever ?drawing something? for classmates to colour in and at home he had created a whole puppet universe for his little sister. As with all bored Uni students, his notes were richly embellished with weird scrawlings, but his were notable for the cartoon universe that littered each page of long-forgotten lectures notes. There just wasn?t such a thing as a cartooning course in Adelaide in the 70s.

            His teaching career began with cartoon-bedecked worksheets, which the kids tended to colour in, rather than pay any attention to their actual contents, and before too long he began his first of many financial-reward-free forays into freelancing. Numerous other life experiences followed, including delivering over a thousand singing telegrams and acting in numerous stage plays.

            A second stint at full-time teaching followed in Victoria, along with much work onstage in community theatre and writing, but still fame did not so much stand tiptoe in the wings but actually might as well have existed in a different universe. Undaunted, he ploughed on through ever-increasing class sizes and politically-correct school agendae, until the ?little surprise? that was his son Jordan being born in Adelaide drew him home to the City of Churches, ever after to raise the lad as a native-born Croweater and rabid follower of the Adelaide Crows in winter and the SA Redbacks in summer.

            Two novels in the hard drive and more hard work at drawing board followed, but ?fame? has only manifested itself in the form of some TV commercials, most notably one involving much hamming it up in a bathroom and another dressed as a fairy. Willing to eschew cross-dressing for cartooning success, he offers Ratrace to all cartoon fans, who have ever been the victim of red tape and Purr-Fect Grammar to those for whom grammar might as well have been their gin-swilling, cantankerous old father?s mother, for all they know about composing accurate sentence structure.

(c) 2002-2005 Andydrew Pty Ltd