Murray Ball
Murray Hone Ball was a New Zealand cartoonist who became known for his Stanley the Palaeolithic Hero, Bruce the Barbarian, All the King's Comrades and the long-running Footrot Flats comic series. In the 2002 Queen's Birthday and Golden Jubilee Honours, Ball was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services as a cartoonist.
Life and work
Ball was born in Feilding in 1939; his father was All Black rugby player Nelson Ball. He grew up in New Zealand before spending some years in Australia and South Africa, where he attended Parktown Boys' High School and finished his education. He played for the Junior All Blacks in 1959 as a "first five-eighth". As a young man he worked for the Dominion newspaper in Wellington and the Manawatu Times before becoming a freelance cartoonist and moving to Scotland, 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, Stanley often expresses left-wing attitudes, and he described himself in the introduction to The Sisterhood as a socialist, and he was avidly anti-apartheid while in South Africa. Despite this, he has also been accused of racism, and often found himself at odds with contemporary leftists, especially on issues regarding gender identity, feminism, transgenderism, and abortion.
In the 2002 Queen's Birthday and Golden Jubilee Honours, Ball was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services as a cartoonist.
Tributes paid to him included these:
''Footrot Flats''
After 1975 Ball wrote several comics in New Zealand, but it was in 1976 that he first published the strip Footrot Flats in Wellington's afternoon newspaper, The Evening Post. It rapidly led to the demise of his other strips including Stanley, which he was still writing for Punch.The strip follows the adventures of a working sheep-dog called "Dog" or "The Dog" or "@*&#!", 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". Dog also has alter-egos including "The Grey Ghost" and "The Iron Paw".
Ball's Footrot Flats has appeared in syndication in international newspapers, and in over 40 published books. Footrot Flats inspired a stage musical,
a theme-park
and New Zealand's first feature-length animated film, Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tale. Footrot Flats characters include Wal, Dog, Cooch, Cheeky Hobson, Aunt Dolly, Horse, Pongo, Rangi, 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.
Ball said he wanted his cartoons 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".