 Barlow began his professional cartooning career with "Australian Scout Magazine" at the age of sixteen, two years later he became a regular contributor to Melbourne based "Inkspots Magazine".Minotaur Books proprietor, Colin Paraskevas, published Barlow's "Zooniverse" comic internationally in a joint venture with Eclipse Comics between 1986 and 1987.Richard Raynis, then producer at DIC offered Barlow the character design supervisor position on "", which he worked on from 1987 to 1989.