John
(Jack) Gibson. The 'Hell' cartoonist of Australian MAN
magazine.
Jack (as he was called) Gibson (or 'Gibby' as his friends called him) grew up in Burwood, NSW, and completed primary school there. He started work as a signwriter and then moved on to illustration. He also found some work as a self-taught draughtsman. But what he really wanted to be was a writer and he had a number of humorous articles published in newspapers between 1927 and 1933. Many of these he illustrated too. His local paper 'The Great Northern' was one of the first publications to take his work.
Gibson also flirted with being an actor and appeared with the Neutral Bay Players Club at the Mosman Town Hall in The Mummy with Mumps during the Club's 1929-1930 season. In the 1930s he spent some time as a model constructor and designer for one of Sydney's amusement parks. He started contributing to the Sydney publishing group K G Murray in 1937. At that time some of his cartoons took on a cubist style but he soon reverted to a more traditional approach. In the December
1937 issue of Man, Gibson wrote a two-page feature on
modern art in which he attempted a brief survey of
surrealism, concluding that: "a lot of people would
rather have something they can understand". The
introduction to that article read: "Man's modernist
artist affected the modern style because he was not
satisfied with 'drawing things as they are'. 'I endeavour
to twist existing forms into decorative designs, not to
distort nature into unrecognisable monstrosities', he
says." He first hit on the Hell idea when he was drawing a couple of men digging a hole in the ground. They dug so deep they suddenly crashed through the ceiling of Hell, whereupon one of the men accused his friend: "You and your six feet more!" Hell made the cover of Man on September 1939, in full colour, and the next year a number of three-page, folding versions of the intricate cartoons were published. Before long Hell became a regular feature, almost always depicting a new arrival in Hell, with a comic blockline explaining how they got there. The head devil, "Ye Bosse" was frequently featured and was a favourite character among servicemen during the war.
In 1945 Man attempted to launch a similar Gibson feature, "Our Town", which, like Hell, was an extremely detailed double-page spread. Unlike Hell, Our Town depicted merely mortal quirks and never gave the cartoonist the same scope for his imagination. It did not last long. Another Gibson trademark cartoon was his "crazy train", in which a misguided steam loco found itself in numerous ludicrous situations. This idea must have struck a chord with train buffs: similar cartoons, written to order by Gibson, were published in the rail industry magazine “Rail Transportation” in the early 1950s. Jack Gibson’s son John followed in his father’s footsteps, pursuing a career in cartooning. He reputedly had to leave Australia to escape his father’s large professional shadow, however, and he works in England under the name John Jensen. He is acknowledged to be one of Britain’s best-ever political cartoonists. Jack’s nephew Mike writes for the Sydney Daily Telegraph as an occasional columnist. For many years Gibson was one of the bohemian artists who lived in or around Kings Cross. Others included Syd Nicholls, Virgil Reilly, George Finey, Unk White and George Sprod. Like most of newspaper artists of that era he was a member of the Journalists' Club. His mother even played piano there. He owned a yellow Goggomobile which was almost always dirty and he kept a pet eagle in a cage in his bathroom. Gibson stopped cartooning in 1973. He said the fun had gone out of it. By then his Hell series had been running for over 35 years. The year after he retired Man magazine folded. For a short time he illustrated some advertisements for a furniture shop in Sydney then took on some other work for the shop before he retired. He moved into a boarding house in Glebe where he was beaten up several times by people after his pension. He died in 1980. Much
information in this article supplied by the Black and
White Artists’ Society. Sign our Guestbook If you want to discuss this subject, we suggest you join our CB&M newslist on YAHOO GROUPS. Any problems or questions? Email John at opsbooks @ aol.com Back to Collecting Books & Magazines Main Index. John Jensen (son of Gibby) 's site
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