Words: David O'Brien

Thanks to Coast Lines magazine

A million smiles: Tez Nightingale’s wild, whacky world of Bogeye

Did you ever doodle strange little characters in the margins of your school books, daydreaming while a teacher droned on about French conjugations? Terry ‘Tez’ Nightingale sure did. But unlike most of us who left those doodles behind with our teenage years, Tez brought his scribbled hero back to life decades later—this time not as a classroom distraction, but as a gift to the world.

From his home in Victor Harbor—where he lives with his wife and three sons—Tez has resurrected Bogeye, a chaotic, red-boot-wearing mischief-maker from his youth, turning his adventures into a vibrant, hilarious graphic series that’s as full of heart as it is absurdity. And the best part - it’s completely free.

“I got an F in French,” Tez admits with a chuckle. “I drew Bogeye on the back of my exercise books because I didn’t want to learn French and the teacher wasn’t very good.” Although he earned reasonable grades elsewhere, it was in those defiant, distracted moments that a spark of creativity took hold. Years later, long after a career spanning the UK and South Australian police forces, Tez rediscovered that spark through a surprisingly personal motivation: helping his son Quinn fall in love with reading.

“He didn’t want to sit and read,” Tez explains. “He wanted to do something more arty. So I drew Bogeye doing silly things—speech bubbles, funny poses—whatever would make him laugh. Suddenly, he was reading the words without even thinking about it.”

What started as a dad’s clever way of encouraging literacy snowballed into a family affair. Soon, all three of Tez’s boys were contributing wild plot twists. “One of them would say, ‘I want Bogeye blown up off the toilet,’ so I’d draw that. It became this collaborative playground.”

Tez’s Bogeye series now has three issues: Desert Racer, Adventures in Space and the newly released Stealing the Mona Lisa. Each book, comprising just 16 pages, is a riot of bold colour, wacky energy and unpredictable turns. Tez crafts each episode using a blend of hand-drawing and digital editing on an iPad, using the Book Creator app—an educational tool his wife introduced him to.

“It blew my mind,” he says. “Not only could I create the whole book, but I could generate a QR code linking directly to it. That was it—I had a product I could hand out to anyone. My own little mission became simple: get people to smile.”

His goal? One million smiles. “Every QR code I hand out, that’s 32 smiles to me,” Tez says. “Multiply that by the 3,000 I’ve already given out, and you start to see the dream forming.”

Despite his clear artistic flair, Tez is quick to clarify he’s no trained illustrator. “The only formal art training I had was a bit of technical drawing,” he says. After earning an engineering diploma, he worked for several years designing machinery protection systems. That background still shows up today—in Bogeye’s unmistakable, squared-off handwriting and precise linework.

“I think that’s where it comes from,” he muses. “It’s all very neat—my way of bringing order to the madness.”

And madness it is. Bogeye isn’t bound by logic or gravity. He’s blown up, launched into space, and flung through time in fast-paced, irreverent scenarios that land somewhere between Dogman and a fever dream. But despite the lunacy, there’s a purpose to every panel.

“Bogeye is chaos, sure,” Tez grins, “but it’s designed chaos. It’s literacy in disguise.”

Unlike many creators today, Tez actively avoids social media and online analytics. “I don’t want to know how many people are reading it, or what they think,” he says. “I didn’t build this to get feedback. I built it for joy.” He’s never asked for money, never tracked a download, and never measured success in terms of clicks or likes. The only connection between Tez and his audience is a printed QR code—and he intends to keep it that way.

“There’s a kind of purity to that,” he says. “It’s not about me. It’s about the moment when someone scans that code and gets a laugh.”

The upcoming fourth issue, The Great Doughnut Fiasco, is inspired by stories from one of his sons, who works in a doughnut van. As with all things Bogeye, expect the ridiculous and the unexpected. But if comparisons to bestselling children’s graphic novels like Dogman come up, Tez shrugs them off.

“I love Dogman—it’s brilliant,” he says. “But I’m not trying to be the next anything. This is just something that happened. An accident of creativity.”

That humility underscores every part of the Bogeye journey. For Tez, it's never been about building a brand or climbing a ladder. It's about the love of creation—and a simple desire to lift others.

In a full-circle moment, Tez laughs at how the school subject he once failed—French—makes a cameo in the latest issue of Bogeye. “There are a few French phrases in there,” he says. “Turns out I remembered a bit after all.”

He reflects on the irony with the grace of someone who’s made peace with life’s twists. “It’s funny, isn’t it? Failing French all those years ago actually led to something wonderful. That’s what they say—failure teaches you more than success. I failed French, but gained my creativity in that moment.”

And now, the rest of us get to share in the result: a quirky little character with red boots and a big heart, drawn by a dad with a dream and a mission to make us smile—one QR code at a time.