This grotesque character is one of New Zealand's best known commercial symbols. He represents a chain of eponymous grocery stores whose members are found in just about every town in the country. He first appeared in the 1950s. I don't know who first drew him. The one in my photograph, which I found fading in a small North Island town, looks among the oldest.
In recent years he has been popularized by Dick Frizzell, a remarkably talented and commercially savvy artist, with whom I briefly worked in the early 1970s. Frizzell has a penchant for taking such characters as the Four Square Man, Mickey Mouse and the iconic Maori tiki and turning them into Roy Lichtenstein-like graphics. How he handles copyright questions is a mystery but nobody seems to be complaining...
© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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