Murray Ball

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The New Zealand-born cartoonist Murray Hone Ball (born 1939 in Feilding in the Manawatu) has become known for his Stanley the Palaeolithic Hero, Bruce the Barbarian and the long-running Footrot Flats comic series. In 2002 Ball became an officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for his services as a cartoonist.

1 Life and work
2 Footrot Flats
3 Bibliography
4 Of interest
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Life and work

Ball grew up in New Zealand before spending some years in Australia and South Africa. As a young man he worked for the Dominion newspaper in Wellington and the Manawatu Times before becoming a freelance cartoonist and moving to England, where he found work with publishers DC Thomson, of Dundee.

He developed his character Stanley and had it published in the influential English humour-magazine Punch. Stanley the Palaeolithic Hero featured a caveman who wore glasses and struggled with the Neolithic environment. It became the longest-running strip in Punch's history, and other English and non-English speaking countries syndicated it. Ball continued to contribute to Punch after returning with his family to New Zealand.

Ball's early cartoons often had political overtones (his mid-70s UK strips included All the King's Comrades, and he described himself in the introduction to The Sisterhood (1993) as a socialist. Stanley often expresses left-wing attitudes^{[citation needed]}).

Ball lives with his wife Pam on a rural property in Gisborne, New Zealand.

[edit] Footrot Flats

Main article: Footrot Flats

In 1976 Ball first published a strip called Footrot Flats in Wellington's afternoon newspaper, The Evening Post. The strip follows the adventures of a working sheep-dog called (if anything) "Dog" or "The Dog", his owner Wal Footrot and the other characters, human and animal, that they encounter or associate with. Ball expresses Dog's thoughts in thought-bubbles, though he clearly remains "just a dog" (rather than the heavily anthromorphised creatures sometimes found in other comics or animation). Dog also has alter-egos including "The Grey Ghost".

Ball's Footrot Flats has appeared in syndication in international newspapers, and in over 30 published books. Footrot Flats inspired a stage musical,^[1] a theme-park^[2] and New Zealand's first feature-length animated film, Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tale (1986). Footrot Flats characters include Wal, Dog, Cooch, Cheeky Hobson, Aunt Dolly, Horse, Charlie, Major, Jess and the Murphy family of Irish and Hunk and Spit.

Footrot Flats features several remarkable traits: its expansive created-universe, complete with ancillary characters, things and places; the fact that the characters slowly but perceptibly age and mature throughout the twenty-year run of the comic; and the gradual encroachment of political themes over the years (particularly environmentalism and gentle parodies of feminism).

Ball has said he has always wanted his cartooning to have an impact. "The heart of a cartoon is the idea, an artist can create a painting, hang it on the wall and be satisfied with what he has achieved even if no-one else sees it. In cartooning you must get a human reaction to the idea. The task of the cartoonist is to translate his idea into a drawing that will have impact".^[3]

[edit] Bibliography

As well as collections of his cartoons Ball has written and illustrated a number of books:

Fifteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest, a satirical look at New Zealand rugby
Migod! It's Bruce the Barbarian
The People Makers' (1970)
The Sisterhood (1993), a comical, but rather irate, masculinist book, which caused some uproar at the time of publication
The Flowering of Adam Budd (described as pornography in one review^{[citation needed]})
Quentin Hankey: Traitor
Tarzan, Gene Kelly And Me (2001) - approximately, an autobiography.
Fred the (Quite) Brave Mouse

Ball has also written a large-format illustrated novel whose verse parodied the Australian bush-ballad as popularised by Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson. Titled The Ballad of Footrot Flats, released around 2001, and originally intended as a second film-script, this work, the first new Footrot material to appear since 1994, proved the last of the Footrot series.

[edit] Of interest

Murray Ball and Charles Schultz each mutually admired the other's work. One Footrot Flats strip shows Dog laughing at a Snoopy cartoon. Schultz wrote the introduction to the only Footrot Flats published in the United States (it appeared as Footrot Flats there, but as Footrot Flats 4 in Australasia.)

At Confurence 9 (January 1998) - a cartoon-convention held in Buena Park, California, attendants participated in an optional survey (designed by artist Roz Gibson) in which they voted for their favourite characters in various categories. The Dog came equal-sixth out of a field of 150, surpassing all Disney characters, and all Warner Brothers characters except Bugs Bunny and Pepe le Pew, despite the fact that the Footrot Flats had gone out-of-print .