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cartoonist, was born in Burwood, NSW. He was apparently christened John but was always known as Jack. His nephew, the Sydney journalist Mike Gibson, called him 'Gibbie’ and said he 'one of the true Bohemians of the old King’s Cross’ – 'a member of the hard working, hard drinking group of journalists and cartoonists who haunted the Cross’. Gibson’s 1930s House of Horror Luna Park, 'Our Town’, appeared in Man , along with many other cartoons, and he also illustrated for Adam , Man Junior and Cavalcade . He drew stylish society and other cartoons in a sophisticated modernist/abstract Art Deco style for Man , e.g. 'Gibson symbolises Nazism, not forgetting the salute’ May 1937, 13. His first cartoon for Man appeared in the March 1937 issue. He had three highly stylised cartoons in the 12th issue (November 1937): a waitress and customer; a couple unable to marry until they can afford a divorce; and “Cheer up, Blondie. Every cloud has a Silver Fox lining” .

In the December 1937 issue, Gibson wrote an article entitled, 'So this is Surrealism; Giving you the lowdown on Modern Art’ (pp.45-46). He had two cartoons in the issue, along with a photo (p.7) that accompanied a description of him as:

“MAN’s modernist artist, who in this issue gives us the low-down on surrealism, 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.”

His cartoon (p.44), “It’s either symbolism or … it’s LOUSY!” faced his article 'So This is Surrealism’, which featured and illustrated Picasso, Ben Nicholson and a lump of clay in a London gallery titled 'Two Ideas and a Navel’. The text also noted the 'monstrosity that was exhibited under the title “Captain Cook’s Last Voyage of Discovery”. It was a dressmaker’s dummy surrounded by a network of wire like a clumsy bird-cage.’ He damned the breakfast cup and saucer covered in brown fur [evidently by Meret Oppenheim] and was against Nicholson, Klee (though he was not 'strictly speaking’ a surrealist, he admitted), Picasso ('Femme Lisant’ 1934 ill. and text p.46), Dali, Dadaists and Freud.

The December 1939 issue of Man had another two Gibson cartoons, one being the coloured cover cartoon showing Hitler in bed being visited by Santa with a pistol, the other a black-and-white cartoon of a man being blown up in the loo. In Man Annual (undated but evidently 1944 – the date on a Hayles cartoon), Gibson had 12 cartoons about: a hot dog stand; water on the knee; bathroom; woman playing poker with three men and asking if four aces is any good; a rain cloud over a single car; mint; cannibal complaining about a wartime privation dinner of Jap (in the pot); butchy man arriving in drag at a poker party because his wife had hidden his clothes; a ferocious dog; wife in bed photographing her husband’s dream; trains about to crash while the operator tries to work out which handle to pull; and an advertised 'room with private bath’ that proves to be a hammock in a bathroom.

This was probably Gibson’s peak period of productivity for Man , but it was not his most distinctive since it pre-dates the subject for which he became world famous. From the 1940s until the demise of the magazine in 1974, Gibson drew madly intricate monthly cartoons for Man set in Hell. They were quite as lunatic as Roland Emmett’s world but more crude, e.g. August 1952 (when Frank S. Greenop was still editor) he did a two-page spread of two men emerging from a rocket into Hell with one saying, “Our calculations may have been a trifle faulty … ask if this is Mars anyway”. The September 1952 double-page spread focuses on a new arrival (“Ah! Dentist Jones! ... Take a seat …’ It won’t hurt a bit’... to coin a phrase”). Part of the pleasure of these drawings is the great variety of intricate (but not realistically painful) tortures and sinful (but not offensive) pleasures taking place all around. Man Annual 1952 had no Hell cartoon by Gibson but only a weak half-page b/w nudist club gag showing a fence and a tree, the speaking male inmates being hidden behind the fence; but the March 1959 and January 1966 issues both contained a double page b/w Hell scene (the only Gibson cartoon). By February 1970 his 'Infernal Nonsense’ had been reduced to a single page, coloured yellow. This one featured two fencers running each other through and other devilish delights. Even so, the Hell series continued until Man’s demise.

Gibson was one of the few local cartoonists to survive for the duration (the only others were Lahm and Vernon Hayles ). The central theme of his intricate 'Infernal Regions’ drawings, usually printed as a double-page spread, is normally a character or couple who have just arrived to find 'Hordes of devils – tempting naked sheilas and boooze’ as well as a certain amount of light-hearted torture. In a 1943 article explaining how to write gags for cartoons ( Man April 1943, 18-19) Albert A. Murray, 'cartoon editor, Man ', wrote:

“Gibbie” said he hit on the idea when he was drawing a couple of blokes digging a hole in the ground. They dug deeper and deeper. Suddenly they crashed through the ceiling as it were and landed in Hell!

Man January 1939 tells the same story, while Albert A. Murray in 'Sweating to Make 'Em Laugh’ ( Man April 1948, pp.18-19) repeats the tale of the trench-digging genesis of Gibson’s 'widely famous’ Hell cartoons filled with 'strange little “djits”, as he called them, (those formless, headless gremlins with a penchant for murmuring tender thoughts like “terts, nertz, adink, adonk”)’. By 1948 the results of Gibson’s watching a trench being dug and wondering what would happen if the bottom of the hole collapsed and the men fell through had been going 'nearly ten years’, Murray noted. “Gibbie” told his nephew Mike that one of the few restrictions K.G. Murray, 'the boss of Man’, put on these cartoons was that no Australian serviceman was to be depicted: 'Old K.G. said Australian soldiers would never go there’.

Gibson retired in the 1970s. He had married three times. His first wife, Anne née Bowley, later Jensen, was the mother of cartoonist John Jensen and Ingrid. His second wife was Daphne Winslow. Gibson died at Sydney in 1980.

Gibson’s son, the cartoonist and illustrator John Jensen of London, has the only known extant original Hell cartoon, although vast numbers are rumoured to be hidden away in some ACP/PBL warehouse (who acquired K.G. Murray publications at some stage).

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007