Simon Ellinas

Bio

Born with a pencil in my hand (an uncomfortable experience for my mother), I started drawing from an early age. The Beano, Dandy and later, American Marvel comics were my main colleges of education. All lecture notes at school were 90% drawings and only 10% notes. Hence my spectacular failure at 'A' level! My first paid commission for caricatures was from a school friend who paid me 5p to draw other people! In those days, 5p was not an insubstantial piece of loose change. Art School (Harrow, Portsmouth) sucked me in and spat me out with an increased ability in painting, sculpure and getting drunk, but even more of a desire to draw cartoons and get published. Work at various publishing houses including what should have been my dream job, at Marvel Comics UK, eventually led to me publishing my first cartoons. (Marvel Comics UK, in those days, had a sort of student squat/sweatshop atmosphere incompatible with my finer sensibilities!) After being asked to leave my last place of permanent employment, The Australasian Express Newspaper (now TNT, available from those little newspaper bins all around London), it became clear that the only person who would employ me was me! And even then, I'm not sure if i'm sort of person I would like to employ! Always keen on writing as well, I wrote hundreds of embarrassing, adolescent lyrics, songs and poems. Which wouldn't be bad, but I was 36 at the time. No, seriously, I was 38. I've had various humorous articles published in national magazines and a few poems in some of those anthologies that only three seriously-bearded and sandal-wearing-types read.