A brilliantly tenuous link from the Irish News, about a cartoonist who once draw MJ. It includes the superb line right at the end:

Mr Knox said he “didn’t feel any huge emotion” when he heard of Jackson’s death but admitted searching for the cartoon on line.

This story has touched us all. Here’s the article in full as it’s not accessible online:

AT the height of Jackson-mania, children across the United States spent their Saturday mornings watching a cartoon series dedicated to five pop stars from Indiana.

To the strains of the hit song ABC, viewers on the channel of the same name watched as the Jackson Five, including a prepubescent Michael Jackson, morphed into their cartoon

alter-egos.

Yesterday, as millions of people reminisced about their memories of the King of Pop, some watched again those old cartoons first broadcast in 1971 and now available on YouTube.

Belfast cartoonist Ian Knox (66) was among those logging on. But he did so for another reason – he was remembering his first job working on the cartoons for the one-time hit television show.

Now more likely to be drawing political figures like Ian Paisley or Martin McGuinness, he spent his first few years huddling over burgeoning images of Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael Jackson.

The exploding cottage industry created by the success of the Jackson Five came around just at the right time for Mr Knox, then a qualified architect living in 1960s London.

“The Beatles animated film The Yellow Submarine had just been and a lot of cartoonists were unemployed,” he said.

“I went around to the Dog and Duck pub where all the animators drank and asked if any of them had any work.

“That was where I heard about this Jackson Five cartoon.

“I was getting fed up with being an architect. I wanted to see if there were any jobs doing cartoon films and that was the one I got.”

He was given an animation test and after “being pushy and calling in to them every day”, he was given the job.

“We were in this factory in Soho and there were about 40 cartoonists working on it including layout, key animators, inbetweeners, tracers and painters,” he said.

“I was an inbetweener – there was an animator who drew all the figures in different positions and my role was to make the figure move from one position to the other.

“We drew on cell with chinagraph pencil and I remember it was very difficult to get the line to stick on the cell.”

Mr Knox admitted he had “never heard” of the group before starting on the cartoon and initially thought the young Michael Jackson was a female singer.

“At that time Michael was only the baby of the group and didn’t really star that much.

“The characters in the cartoon didn’t actually look very much like the real boys and we used to joke about that all the time.

“We worked on it for about nine months and then moved on to a cartoon on the Osmonds.

“I remember the funny thing was that all the voices of the characters were done by male actors.

“Even the female characters like the girlfriends or the mother were done by a man using a falsetto voice.

“It was good fun and I remember we all kept on being laid off and then re-employed, working in a factory loft one time and then a basement another.”

Now a leading political cartoonist – his work with The Irish News and BBC’s Hearts and Minds is hugely popular – Mr Knox is rather critical of his early work.

“It was just factory work really,” he said.

“The only bit that was any good was the beginning which was a dance sequence by the cartoonist Ginger Gibbons.

“The chief cartoonist, Oscar Grilo, was also very good and he used to do things like put crocodile heads on the Jackson Five.”

While the cartoons were first broadcast in 1971, decades later fans are still watching them on the internet site YouTube.

Yesterday nostalgic fans posted tributes to Michael Jackson beside broadcasts of the show on the site.

Mr Knox said he “didn’t feel any huge emotion” when he heard of Jackson’s death but admitted searching for the cartoon on line.

“People are remembering his early life and, in a way, his life has come full circle,” he said.

Thanks to Claire for this.