There was always more to Cornwall than met the eye. For one thing he had another name: Mark. But no matter. Cartooning and the more porridgy corners of the British public school system are the last preserves of surname-only identification.

“Cornwall?”

“Yes sir?”

“Stop teasing the school leopard.”

“Righto sir.”

The person behind the pen inhabits a space curiously detached from the signed creation. One is a Cornwall, the other is Mark.

There is a famous little story from the old-time Age subs-desk (back when they had a mind and the time for bons mot) that captures this somewhat inkily arcane separation: the night editor, receiving a faxed pocket cartoon for the next day’s front page, chortles, “Ha! Ron’s done a good Tandberg.”

And Mark did many a good Cornwall. Every working day for most of the past seven years. He began as the signature image accompanying the columns of one Hillary Bray, the hermaphroditic hack later outed as the resolutely masculine Christian Kerr. Both Cornwall and Kerr would survive this moment of awkward revelation, Christian going on to forge his own now-celebrated career in letters, while Cornwall would come to inhabit most corners of the Crikey daily email.

He’d send in his half dozen drawings each morning, each batch followed by a confirming email addressed to the bunker-bound production team Mark always saluted as his “Brave Crikeys”.

He became the visual expression of Crikey’s alertly cynical ethos and of its cast. His John Howard, crocodile jawed, scuttling, eyebrows like antennae, was the very essence of “The Rodent”. His Downer squeezed an abundant pomposity into a waiting fishnet, his Costello was a leering Dollar Sweetie. A good cartoonist can sum the times in a line and a smudge, and the Howard decade was as much Cornwall’s as anyone’s.

Today Cornwall and Crikey are parting ways, Cornwall to new projects (we suspect a somewhat ill-considered side project with Rick Wakeman and Phil Manzanera), Crikey to continue less adorned, but no less bravely, and happy to have been partnered for seven years with Mark “Toons” Cornwall.

We wish him well.