Brandt Peters

Steve Bell’s cartoons

Guardian newspaper cartoonist Steve Bell is a bit of a household treasure in England: a very astute political observer who picks up so well on the little nuances in speech and image that are key to good cartoonists. His work is nothing short of hilarious. So he must have felt like a present landed on his lap the day Bush came into power — depictions of him as a monkey, a lame duck, his ’special relationship’ with Blair, and so on, are some of the best I’ve seen. No-one gets an easy ride: he’s now having a whale of a time with Palin.

Martin Abel’s comic flair

Sassy waifs are the hallmark of Martin Abel’s work. Graphite collides with vector style to create edgy damsels with only a dash of decorum between them. This is some sexy work, regardless of your persuasion. Complimented with a classic comic flair, Abel’s other contributions include work for the official X-box magazine. Keep an eye on this rising star ladies and gentlemen.

Bogleech

Maryland-based cartoonist Jonathan Wojcik’s obsession with insects, monsters, and anything related to Halloween comes through hilariously clearly in his web comic, Bogleech. Check out the rest of his site for various projects and his Etsy shop.

Ken Taylor

Australian illustrator Ken Taylor has created imagery for some of rock n’ ’roll’s great purveyors of sound, from the Rolling Stones and Queens of the Stone Age, to Nine Inch Nails and the Mars Volta. He has an easily recognizable style that screams sharp edge cool. Bold and bawdy, Taylor’s pieces use vivid colour to create a cut-out-comic-like feel reminiscent of old movie posters from the 1930s and 40s.

Kelly Smith

Beautiful, delicate, fragile, a little bit collage, a little bit sketchfull. This is the work of Kelly Smith. Combining several mediums in a collaborative expose between pencil, paint and print to create timeless works of elegant splendour, it is easy to compare Smith’s works to the last snowflake of winter, fleeting but real, avoiding the brash bright mercantile world for the prettier climes of illustrative pleasure. Smith has a twelve-day exhibition on at the 696 Space in Brunswick, Melbourne, opening November 14.

The salacious creations of Tyson McAdoo

Tyson McAdoo is responsible for depicting these salacious bombshells, taking seemingly ordinary situations — like sitting on a couch, riding a motorbike or riding an invisible horse (things I am sure we’ve all done at some stage) — and adding some sassy young minx as the focal point, creating a playground for your eyeballs. Apparently McAdoo is imprisoned within his creative universe, or some dungeon according to his bio, accompanied only by ‘two pathetic ghetto rats, Squeezie and Pocket’, and forced to draw the Empress of Ink over and over each day so she dare not fade. You can pick up prints of his work online, and they are damn reasonably priced compared to what some prints go for these days.