Footrot Flats creator Murray Ball has died, aged 78.
Friend and long-time collaborator Tom Scott said he received a call this afternoon to say Ball had passed away.
"I know he had been ill," Scott said.
"He was being nursed at home for a terrible illness."
Scott and Ball worked together on the full-length animated Footrot Flats movie.
"He was an unbelievably strong, fit, handsome man all his life, with a full head of hair," he said.
Scott said Ball was "funny and goofy and generous, and incredibly serious about inequality".
"He mourned the New Zealand he remembered being fair, and I guess if he had his life over again, Murray would rather have been an editorial cartoonist."
Scott said he had "left it a bit late" to see Ball before he died, and last saw him six years ago.
The Kiwi cartoonist was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2002 for services as a cartoonist.
The Manawatu man settled in Gisborne and began working on his comic in 1975.
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