When 21-year-old Kiwi cartoonist Les Gibbard bounded down the gangplank of a Greek liner at Southampton in 1967, he was braced to overwhelm Fleet St with his talent. Fleet St, however, remained underwhelmed.
Gibbard said later he would have starved in the Big Smoke if not for a chance caricaturehe did of actor Rex Harrison which he peddled all around Fleet St. This led to the Sunday Telegraph and a regular outlet.
Within two years Gibbard became the youngest cartoonist ever to have a regular slot on the Guardian, formerly home to one of his cartooning heroes, fellow New Zealander Sir David Low.
In 25 years at the Guardian, Gibbard carved out his own Low-rivalling reputation, pricking egos, sharply observing the idiocies of government, unscrambling political doublespeak and, against the tyranny of daily deadlines, still being consistently funny.
He reflected with clarity, sanity and unmalicious wit eras from the Cold War and Harold Wilson's "common man", to Yeltsin and Gorbachev, the dominating Maggie Thatcher and sink-without-trace John Major. Tall, shaggy and personally as mild as milk stout, Gibbard seemed an unlikely "hammer of the Tories", as lauded by a prominent Labourite. Nor to be denounced as a "traitor" by supporters of "Queen Maggie" when his reworking of a famous World War II cartoon expressed his anger at the waste of human life in the Falklands War.
He owed much to the keen journalistic eye developed as a callow reporter/cartoonist on the Auckland Star and the New Zealand Herald.
He managed to get himself sacked from both, but not before learning much from the Herald's great Minhinnick.
Gibbard became a highly skilled film animator, working on the Oscar-winning film Who Killed Roger Rabbit? and also on Wind in the Willows and Beatrix Potter stories.
Les Gibbard died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism after a routine knee reconstruction. He is survived by his wife, Susannah, and his first wife, Glenys.
