Phil Day is an award-winning comic artist from Queensland's south-east. 

“I always knew I wanted to be a cartoonist,” says Phil, who admits that his aptitude for comic sketching and his off-beat sense of humour were honed during his school years.

“I found myself from an early age looking for the funnier side of situations. In early high school and going into mid-high school the teachers would confiscate my drawings and keep them for themselves.”

Phil left school after year ten and went to work on the family farm. His love of rural life (one of his hobbies is restoring old tractors) inspired his first cartoon strip about a family and a cow called Maggie living on a dairy farm. Maggie has been running for 30 years in the Beaudesert Times and has been taken up by rural newspapers in Queensland and Tasmania.

With no formal training, Phil drew on his technical drawing skills and eye for the absurd to develop his distinctive laconic style. It’s no surprise that he is a fan of the late Eric Jolliffe, whose outback cartoons illustrated the stoicism of Saltbush Bill through the trials of drought, flood and the Great Depression, and of Murray Ball of Footrot Flats fame.