A CARTOONIST'S working day is divided into two halves - pre-idea and post-idea. Once the concept comes to mind, the rest is comparatively easy.
For The Weekend Australian's renowned cartoonist Bill Leak, the idea for today's cartoon came right on schedule - at 10.30am yesterday, just prior to the paper's regular morning news conference.
What makes today's cartoon remarkable is that exactly 11 weeks ago, Leak was lying in a coma in Sydney's Royal North Shore Hospital after landing on his head after falling from a balcony during an afternoon party at the NSW central coast property of ad man John Singleton.
His brain was badly swollen and there were concerns for his life. Even if he survived the two operations he underwent to remove a blood clot, no one knew whether Leak would ever be able to draw again.
"Having the idea was such a relief, a moment of pure joy,'' he said yesterday.
After the idea came to him yesterday morning he followed what has become normal practice - bouncing the idea off someone he trusts. In this case it was a popular blogger for The Weekend Australian, Jack The Insider.
Jack liked the idea: a brain-damaged cartoonist, in a Rip Van Winkle moment, complaining that the world no longer made sense.
The cricket team regarded as the world's best only three months ago was in disarray, while, counter-intuitively, the Government was urging people to prepare for tough economic times by spending as much as they could.
Leak said one of the things he finds most disturbing about his brain injury were the hallucinations that left him with vivid recollections of things that never happened.
In hospital he would complain bitterly about the raucous conduct of the old lady in the bed next to him, yet she was unconscious the whole time.
When he regained consciousness after four days he at first refused to believe he had been in an accident. For a start, he could distinctly remember submitting his regular cartoons.
When, after several weeks, he finally got home from hospital the first thing he did was check his computer - and sure enough the last cartoon to be published was on October 18, the day of his fall. With Wall Street crashing, it showed Marx and Lenin celebrating the end of capitalism while reading The Age.
"The doctors have warned me that I will discover I can't do things I have always taken for granted,'' he said.
"I live in quiet expectation of finding out what those things are. It is awful. It is a fear something is going to be taken away.''
Thankfully, cartooning is not a skill Leak has lost. He still looks entirely at ease as he sketches rapidly.
"The drawing is pure pleasure,'' he said. "But cartoons are more than just about drawing, they are visual concepts. Coming up with the idea is the most difficult part.
"I've been afraid of the possibility that I wouldn't be able to concentrate long enough and hard enough. I was so happy when the idea came.''
