Andy Fanton's drawing style through ten years of change

Over ten years, the cartooning work of Andy Fanton has shifted in ways both subtle and dramatic. From the rough-hewn mini-strips posted on a personal site to the polished pages that appeared in The Dandy, the visual language keeps renewing itself while staying unmistakably his own.

This look at the trajectory of his style considers the tools, influences, and recurring characters that have shaped it. Readers familiar with Australian comics culture will recognise the dry wit and larrikin edge running through everything from Boo! to Bad Grandad, qualities that have always been part of the appeal.

Early foundations and shared roots

Element	2014 to 2017	2020 to 2024
Linework	Scratchy dip-pen strokes	Varied-weight digital brushes
Character eyes	Oversized dot pupils	Tighter, more expressive
Backgrounds	Mostly white space	Crosshatched, fully built
Colour approach	Spot tones only	Full palette in many strips
Panel layout	Standard four-panel grid	Dynamic, irregular grids
Comedy timing	Visual gag driven	Pacing built on dialogue beats

In the earliest years of the decade, Fanton's drawing style leaned on the traditions of British weekly comics such as The Dandy, which had a devoted readership scattered across Sydney and Melbourne newsagents for decades. There was a printed-comic sensibility to the linework, with thick borders and characters who felt carved out of newsprint.

His tools were humble: a dip pen, a bottle of Indian ink, and whatever scrap paper happened to be on the kitchen table. The proportions of his figures were deliberately lumpy, with hands slightly too big and feet slightly too small, a cartooning shorthand familiar to anyone who grew up reading cheeky suburban misfits in the back of an exercise book.

Tools and medium shifts

Around the middle of the decade, the workflow changed. Fanton began layering scans of finished ink under digital brushes in programs like Procreate and Clip Studio Paint. A panel he once spent an evening redrawing could now be nudged into place in minutes, and the resulting consistency freed up his appetite for more ambitious pages.

Strips like George vs Dragon grew richer in background detail, the medieval-flavoured settings suddenly full of flagged banners, flagstones, and thatched rooftops drawn with confident, varied line weight. Keeping the toolkit simple enough that it never becomes the story is a lesson any cartoonist juggling day jobs and deadlines eventually absorbs.

Australian wit and the larrikin tradition

There is a strand of Australian humour that prizes understatement, an eye for the underdog, and a willingness to puncture authority, and it quietly informs Fanton's character writing throughout. Carrotty Kid reads like a small-town larrikin dropped into a medieval village, the kind of figure a Brisbane schoolkid would happily doodle on a brown paper bag.

The Dandy might be Scottish in origin, but the comics were traded like currency in Australian schoolyards for generations, and that inheritance shows in the pacing of his gags. A set-up that takes three panels in a polished American strip will often land in one in his work, and that brevity is part of the appeal. Punchline construction in particular has been something he has worked on deliberately, and his notes on how to write a punchline that lands overview reflect years of trimming fat from scripts.

Character design across the years

George from George vs Dragon was once drawn with a soft jawline and timid posture, the kind of hero a shy reader might picture themselves as. Over the years he has become slightly more upright and slightly more sceptical, a change that tracks with the way his supporting cast has grown louder. The dragon, by contrast, started as a fairly standard wyrm and has gradually accumulated eyebrows, scarves, and an almost grumpy dignity.

This kind of incremental redesign is rarely announced, and that is the point. Readers who have followed the strip since the first issue know what changed, but newcomers see a coherent character with a settled look. The same steadying hand shaped Boo! and Bad Grandad, two strips that began as throwaway sketches and became some of his most recognisable creations.

Linework and texture transformations

The early ink lines had a kind of scratchy charm, the kind of mark that can only come from a pen dragged briskly across textured paper. The latest brushwork carries more weight variation, with thick down-strokes and wispy up-strokes giving the figures more bounce. Crosshatching, sparingly used in the earlier work, now appears in shadows, clothing folds, and the occasional cobblestone street.

These shifts are easier to see when early pages are placed next to recent ones, which Fanton has done in recent exhibitions and shared print bundles. The textures have not just thickened; they have become more patterned, almost decorative in places, and that gives his medieval settings an old-illustration warmth without feeling overworked.

Panel composition and storytelling

Early Fanton pages leaned heavily on a standard four-panel grid, which suited the short-form nature of his earliest mini-strips. As scripts grew longer and the joke structures more elaborate, the grids loosened. Splashes, half-page panels, and stacked tiers began appearing in Boo! and Carrotty Kid, often used to slow a gag down just before the punchline lands.

Australian cartoonists have always had to compete for attention in a market full of imported American superhero weeklies, and that pressure rewards designers who can make a small page feel generous. Fanton's layouts now routinely treat whitespace as a tool, not an absence, with the eye led rather than pushed across each spread.

Where the style sits today

The current look pulls together ten years of small adjustments rather than announcing any single reinvention. The brushwork is more assured, the characters more anatomically aware without losing their cartoony stretch, and the stories carry the relaxed confidence of a creator who has stopped trying to imitate anyone.

There is also something pragmatic to the way he runs the work now, including the unglamorous side of being a working cartoonist, from managing online subscriptions to navigating services such as prepaid gambling card reviews when paying for digital tools. The contemporary pages also show the influence of streaming-era comedy pacing, with jokes structured to land for readers who skim as much as for readers who linger.

For anyone wanting to follow the latest pages, prints, and television projects, the best starting point is the creator's own site. Subscribe to the mailing list, browse the archive of the past decade, and keep an eye out for the next medieval-flavoured misadventure at Andy Fanton Dot Com.