'Paul Temple'.
John McNamara was born in 1918 in New Zealand. He already started drawing caricatures for local magazines and newspapers when he was still a teenager. Between the late 1930s and 1951, he worked as an editorial cartoonist for The Southern Cross. He was also a member of the New Zealand Cartoonist's Assocation.
In March 1950, McNamara moved to the United Kingdom, where he would stay for the rest of his life. His earliest comics were adaptations of C.S. Forester's novel series '"Bats" Belfry" and 'Horatio Hornblower', serialized in The Daily Mail. For the Thriller Comics book series, he also created comic book adaptations of 'Hopalong Cassidy', 'Dick Turpin', 'Robin Hood', 'Westward Ho!' and 'The Red Book of Courage'.
Between 1958 and 1971, McNamara was the final artist of the British newspaper comic 'Paul Temple'. He took over the artwork from Bill Bailey, who had continued the comic after the departure of the original artist, Alfred Sindall, in 1954. This detective series was a comic adaptation from Francis Dubridge's radio series and novels which, by this point, was also broadcast on TV. McNamara remodelled the protagonist so he would resemble the TV actor Francis Matthews, who played Paul Temple on television.
In 2001, John McNamara died in Surrey, United Kingdom, at age 82.