Glen Baxter has left the building

I am a huge fan of cartoons and comic strips and Glen Baxter, who passed away aged 82, was a big favourite.

Glen Baxter created a surreal artistic universe populated by erudite cowboys, tweed-clad empire-builders and malevolent Boy Scouts. His fame was higher outside England where he was considered a modern Surrealist Master. At home he sadly often fell into the funny greeting-cards category.

His drawings relied for their offbeat humour as much on their absurd deadpan captions as on the artfully simplistic drawings.

Often the drawings themselves were offbeat, such as the one featuring a man sawing off his own leg in front of two children, with the caption “Uncle Frank would keep us amused for hours”

Look at the image above: the bottom half of the lady inside the chimney suggests she is stolidly middle-aged, while the ‘husband’ looks like a teenager in his shorts. Can’t you imagine Baxter sitting at his work table thinking up all this nonsense? Not a bad day job…

Some images would depend for their effect wholly on the caption: two co-habitees glowering at each other: “The tension at No 83 had been almost unbearable ever since Eric had deliberately swallowed Toby’s anorak.”

Baxter was inspired by pulp fiction and old adventure comics which he combined with literary nonsense. The delightfully old-fashioned pictures depict incongruous characters such as cowboys, explorers and Boy Scouts uttering intellectual statements regarding art and philosophy.

This is probably not to everyone’s taste, but I love his work. And for those interested, here is a fun interview about his life and aspirations.

Interview with Glen Baxter