| Fil Barlow | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 8, 1963 Adelaide, Australia |
| Occupation | Character designer |
| Known for | Zooniverse |
Fil Barlow (1963- ) is an Australian artist, cartoonist, writer, production designer currently based in Los Angeles. Barlow is the creator of the Zooniverse comic book published in 1986-87.
Barlow was born in 4 August 1963 in Adelaide, South Australia. In 1965 his family moved to North Balwyn. Being mildly dyslexic Barlow was encouraged by his primary school teachers and mother to pursue drawing at an early age. He wrote his first comic strip, Fudsey, at age of twelve, which was published in a Sunday paper and ran for four weeks.
Barlow began his professional cartooning career with Australian Scout Magazine at the age of sixteen, two years later he became a regular contributor to Melbourne based Inkspots Magazine. Minotaur Books proprietor, Colin Paraskevas, published Barlow's Zooniverse comic internationally in a joint venture with Eclipse Comics between 1986 and 1987.
Richard Raynis, then producer at DIC offered Barlow the character design supervisor position on ALF, which he worked on from 1987 to 1989. Barlow studied art in Melbourne, creating Rex Vectar, which first appeared in Megazone' magazine in 1991 and ran until 1994, before moving to the Gold Coast in 1992 to work as a designer in the movie industry, where he also established his own publishing house, Zoonimdedia. In mid 1994 he moved to Brisbane, with two artists associated with Kinetic Comics, Helen Maier and Matt Thompson. In 1996 Barlow returned to Los Angeles with Maier, establishing an animation production house, Artopia. Through his company Barlow has worked as a character design supervisor and lead character designer at Columbia Tristar, working on Extreme Ghostbusters, the animated Godzilla series, the 3D series Starship Troopers: Roughneck Chronicles, Max Steel, Heavy Gear and Adam Sandler's feature Eight Crazy Nights.
From 2001 onwards Barlow has worked independently as character and production designer on Tutenstein, Igor and the creation of Spectrobes game for Disney.