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Lemon has been a freelance artist since 1987. Aside from cartoons, comic strips and illustrations, he has created numerous multimedia titles including “Professor Doodle’s Algebra”, “Rocket Reader” and “Double Doozy” CD-ROMS. He has also done work for the Dr. Demento Show & Yowza comic, The Guardian, the Elvis Presley Fan Club, Virgin Records, Radio Times Magazine, Music Week magazine, iD Magazine, Zig Zag Magazine and Poot Comic. Exhibitions and awards include the Face Gallery, Tokyo (Record cover designs 1991), South East Arts Award for poster design (1989), Architrave Gallery, San Francisco (computer animation as part of a Mark Cornblatt installation 1994), Unframed Gallery, San Francisco (2001) and "Moment's Notice" Galerķa de la Raza / Studio 24, San Francisco (2003). He drew the comic strip “Bigshot” which appeared in the monthly Film/Tape World for five years (1998-2003). He now draws a weekly cartoon for HybridCars.com. His current comic "Lemonworld" appears on several websites. BIOGRAPHY Jonathan Lemon was born at an early age in a small town in Western Europe on Friday 13th of April sometime in the mid-sixties. His misspent childhood consisted entirely of self-absorption, reading comics, bad drawing, and disappointments to his family. Despite having his body hardened by daily sadistic beatings from the neighborhood bullies, he turned out to be an overly sensitive, severely introverted, sad little sissy-boy. He aimlessly drifted through schooling despite being afflicted with buck teeth, impaired vision and lack of any kind of social skills. After attaining the entirely impractical graduate degree in Visual and Performing Arts he worked his way through a series of unglamorous occupations including cleaning toilets, stand-up comedy, peeling stickers off records and walking up and down the beach wearing a sandwich board, handing out leaflets to topless bathers. However he spent most of his time doodling in small notebooks and fantasizing about impossible relationships with unobtainable women. As a reaction to a life of bitter regrets and dashed idealistic hopes he took up writing songs and by pure luck and good fortune become a very minor pop star in the eighties when any pretty boy with a synthesizer on an ironing board could sign up with a record label and make tens of dollars releasing vinyl containing songs with corny nonsensical lyrics and quirky titles. His band toured the world where they completely failed to get laid, took very few drugs and were more known for tidying up dressing rooms instead of trashing them. At the tender age of 24, he was orphaned and moved illegally to California where he scraped out a living washing dishes, working at the zoo, evading the INS, scraping road kill off the asphalt and racing cockroaches. Somewhere in between he learned Spanish and moved to Cuba to attend the University of Havana where he turned his back on the materialism for a few months until he missed easy hedonistic access to cheap music and vegetarian food. He has lived in the City by the Fog for about 5000 years which a few years back enabled him to become a US citizen in time to cast an all important vote for Ralph Nader in the 2000 presidential election. He stupidly quit a decent job during a depressive fit, most likely brought on by a soured relationship, and then promptly and utterly failed to eke out a living as a freelance illustrator and cartoonist. After several minutes of falling in love with the wrong people and watching his life unceremoniously crumble away he finally met the love of his life whom he wed in Mexico and still thinks is pretty hot. Just when things were starting to go well he took his new bride on a bizarre two year excursion to make cartoon tourist maps in Central America. They lived in a tiny two bit one horse town where they went crazy with boredom. Then, just because life is full of the unexpected, they moved to the capital to work for the United Nations and lived the highlife of ex-pats. Now back in his cozy Mission district Victorian on the same street as legendry Last Gasp press, he's actually a wistful, sensitive, sweet-natured fellow who is still conscious of his near intelligible foreign accent. He is now still trying to eke out a living again as an illustrator/ cartoonist/ web designer, which suddenly seems to involve an inordinate amount of networking and competing for work among insanely talented 18-year olds—another cruel irony of fate for this hermit-like, nostalgic Luddite. Nowadays he spends unhealthy amounts of time in the basement drawing cartoons, recording music that no one is interested in and doing the New York Times crossword. He drives a fire engine red 2001 Toyota Echo, likes world cinema and has no cats.
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