Greg Bishop is a San Diego veterinarian, whose previous jobs include marine mammal stranding coordinator in the San Juan Islands, field researcher in the Amazon jungle and assistant at the San Diego Natural History Museum.
He’s also a very good cartoonist, as you can see from the cartoons on this page and on his website, Fauna Cartoon. Greg claims to get his ideas from monkeys at the zoo, giving him a scapegoat if someone complains. By the way, he once worked at the San Diego Zoo.
Greg says he has been drawing since he could hold a pencil, including cartoons for school newspapers from middle school clear through graduate school.
Before vet school, he studied ecology at the University of California at Davis, where he illustrated a cartoon strip about squirrels. Check out the online version of “Nuts.” Earlier works (not available) include “The Turtle Avenger,” “Sentient Vegetables In the Big City,” and “The Meaty Adventures of Corn Dog and Bacon Boy.” I can only imagine what these were like.
Greg’s current cartoon series, “Fauna Cartoon,” ranges from smart to silly, and I really enjoy the variety. The quality of his drawings is exceptional. He doesn’t pump out new cartoons as fast as some artists, and I know his fans are clamoring for more, but Greg has plenty of other things going on in his life.
He says his hobbies include surfing, bird-watching, painting, 80s hair-metal, welding, history and theoretical physics.
If you like Greg’s cartoons, you can buy an autographed print or enjoy them on merchandise — including clothing of all kinds, bags, cell-phone covers, water bottles, coffee mugs and all sorts of stuff. Greg’s online store can be found on the Galloree website.
The cartoon at right shows one water buffalo buying bottled water from a stand while the rest of the herd drinks from a crocodile-infested river.
I became aware of Greg through the SeaDoc Society, a nonprofit research group based on Orcas Island and affiliated with U.C. – Davis. In 2011, Greg worked as a summer intern for SeaDoc, helping coordinate responses to stranded marine mammals, including performing necropsies on dead animals. Based on that work, he presented his findings about the causes of harbor seal deaths at a meeting of the International Association for Aquatic Animal Medicine.
