About
Chris Simonite is a cartoonist, musician and artist based in Winnipeg, Manit0ba, Canada. His cartooning career began in the 1980s with a well received (but badly drawn) comic strip called Geezers, which occasionally featured a gorilla. It ran in the University of Manitoba student newspaper The Manitoban from 1987 to 1988. After graduating from the University of Manitoba, rather than continuing Geezers, Simonite took a brief fifteen-year hiatus from cartooning to pursue a career as a rock star in bands you’ve never heard of.
After resigning himself to the fact that his future did not lie in the music industry, Simonite took up residence in a box on the corner of Portage and Main in Winnipeg. While there, he started to once again produce cartoons for The Manitoban. His focus, this time, was to produce editorial cartoons, which were distributed across the country by the Canadian University Press. Eventually, Simonite decided to revive his old comic strip in the form of Gorilla in the Midst while pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba. During these years in the late 2000s he was dragged kicking and screaming into developing an interest in contemporary art. This lead to a move to Ottawa where Simonite received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa in 2012.
2013 marks the debut of Gorilla in the Midst as a webcomic, which Simonite intends to update at least once a week while pursuing his other interests and trying to make tiny amounts of cash. Initially inspired to be a cartoonist by Peanuts, he is also influenced by the Big Three (at least for his generation): Bloom Country, Calvin and Hobbes and the Far Side as well as Doonesbury. He is also incredibly impressed with the quality of webcomics, whose cartoonists are allowed a freedom never before seen in the world of newspaper comics.
Simonite lives in Ottawa with his wife (sugar mama) Anne, and his cat Wellington, who, apropos of nothing, pees out of his belly.
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