Who first created and drew the Golang gopher?

If you’ve used Golang or have at least heard of it, then you’ve very likely seen this little creature around:

This mascot is virtually synonymous with the actual programming language, and it’s probably the best animal mascot for something in software engineering since the Linux penguin, Tux:

The question does arise, though, where in the world did this gopher come from? Who first created it?

What if I told you that the gopher was first made for nothing to do with a statically typed, compiled programming language?

In fact, the gopher was created by artist Renee French, who actually has a Wikipedia article!

French, with her pen name Rainy Dohaney, has many published works to her name, among them H Day, The Soap Lady, The Ticking, Edison Steelhead’s Lost Portfolio: Exploratory Studies of Girls and Rabbits, and Marbles in My Underpants.

Around the turn of the 21st century, French was commissioned to design a t-shirt of all things for the WFMU radio station in New Jersey. The design she came up with has a familiar face in it: