Paul Rigby

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Paul Crispin Rigby AM (October 25, 1924 – November 15, 2006), usually working under the name Rigby, was an award-winning Australian cartoonist who worked principally for newspapers in the UK, the US and Australia.

Born Sandringham, Melbourne, Rigby studied art at Brighton Technical School before leaving at 15 to work as a commercial artist, eventually taking up freelance work. Rigby served in the Royal Australian Air Force during World War II, from 1942 to 1946, seeing action in North Africa and Europe.

Rigby's first newspaper work was as an illustrator with West Australian Newspapers in 1948. However, his work as a political cartoonist started at the Perth Daily News in 1952, where he won five Walkley Awards between 1960 and 1969. Rigby worked briefly at Rupert Murdoch's Sydney Daily Mirror but Murdoch had recently purchased English tabloid The Sun and in 1969, Rigby relocated to London to work on Murdoch's new acquisition alongside Clive Collins. Rigby also contributed work to the News of the World, the German Springer Group and the U.S. National Star.

Rigby returned to Australia in 1974 to work at the Sydney Daily Telegraph and then moved to the U.S. to work at another new Murdoch acquisition, the New York Post, also contributing to the Star. He won a New York Press Club Award in 1981 and a Newspaper Guild Page One Award in 1982. From 1984 to 1992, he worked at the New York Daily News.

Rigby worked in pen and ink on Bristol board (Grafix or Craftint).

Rigby also made a foray into the Fremantle restaurant scene in the late 1960s - 70s. He opened a classy (for Fremantle) beef and burgundy joint in a High Street basement at the west end of town. It was about opposite where the Roma Italian restaurant was. Both places are now only nostalgic memories.^{[citation needed]}

In an entrepreneurial mood in Western Australia he also privately-published a course on how to draw cartoons.

Rigby and his wife had retired to the Margaret River area in Busselton, Western Australia, in 2003, where he died of a heart attack on 15 November 2006.^[1]