Kudelka was born in Burnie on the north coast of Tasmania in 1972. After selling his first cartoon at the age of nine, he went on to draw political cartoons for more than 30 years, some 10,000 of which were published. He won Walkley awards for best cartoon in 2008 and 2018, as well as Kennedy, Stanley and News awards. He was the Museum of Australian Democracy's political cartoonist of the year in 2010 and 2019.
Over the last two decades, 45-year-old library assistant John Takis has witnessed some of the most important events in modern U.S. history. He lived through the cyber paranoia of Y2K. He saw the violent, fiery destruction of the World Trade Center broadcast on television. He heard the American government loudly declare war on Iraq not once, but twice. None of these dark, confusing experiences of the early 2000s, however, could prepare him for one of the strangest - and maybe most maligned - pop culture artifacts in recent memory: the Dilberito.