#2: Tony Husband - A very fond remembrance
My friend and frequent collaborator Tony Husband passed away a year ago this week. A little look back at our work and times together.
It’s one year this week since the passing of my old friend and collaborator, cartoonist Tony Husband. In London for a Private Eye magazine party on a Thames barge, Tony suffered a heart attack on Westminster Bridge. He was 73.
I first met Tony in 1983, after he’d written to me out of the blue, saying that he was a fellow cartoonist and admired my work. I invited him to my studio in the Canada House building in Manchester city center. Tony wasn’t a full time cartoonist in those days … I think he worked in a watch repair shop or a jeweler’s or something like that … and when he turned up at the studio, he brought some of his work to show me. His portfolio consisted of a battered old hardback book with bits of newspaper clippings stuck over the pages. As he handed it to me, I had a sinking feeling that I might have invited a crackpot into my studio … but I thought I’d better just glance at the pages and feign interest so as not to offend. But then I realized that I actually recognized his work and it was really great. There was one cartoon in particular that I had seen previously and it had made me laugh out loud. I’ve scoured the internet for it but can’t track it down, so a description will have to suffice. It was a woman who had evidently committed suicide by putting her head in the gas oven. She had left a suicide note telling her husband she couldn’t take it any more because all he thought about was sex, sex, sex. She was kneeling on all fours, head in the oven … and the husband was scooting into position behind her, tongue out, spotting a leering expression as he unzipped his fly.
With filth like that, how could we not become fast friends? Although we had very different personas … I was flash, gregarious and very cocky, Tony was quiet and laconic with a deadpan delivery … we enjoyed making each other laugh, and what better basis than that is there for a friendship?
Within a few months, Tony had quit the day job and thrown himself full time into cartooning and comics. His first book “Use Your Head,” about the myriad uses you can find for a severed head, showcased his dark humor. I still have my dog-eared signed copy:
When Debs and I got married in 1984, his wedding gift was suitably Tony-esque:
When I got too busy to continue working on “Cannon,” the football comic I’d created for Match Weekly, another artist was drafted in and Tony took over the writing duties:
When Tony, along with his cohorts Patrick Gallagher and Mark Rodgers, launched the comic “Oink” in 1986, Tony invited me to do a few covers and a comic strip:
In 1989, we created Ray of the Rangers for Britain’s top-selling soccer magazine Shoot! … my art, Tony’s scripts … and that ran every week for five years. By then I’d moved to the States and Tony’s handwritten scripts, containing the most atrocious spelling you’ve ever seen, would whirr over the fax machine in the middle of the night.
If you are interested in the full story of how Tony and I created “Ray of the Rangers,” there’s an in-depth look in a post on my “Playing For A Draw” section:
We saw each other regularly over the years during my trips back to the UK.
Although we often exchanged notes, the last time I saw Tony was when we both appeared at The Lakes Comic Art Festival in Kendal in 2017. He was there to promote his acclaimed book, the poignant “Take Care, Son: The Story of My Dad and his Dementia.”
Perhaps Tony’s most famous creation was Yobs, the comic strip he created for U.K. satirical magazine Private Eye in 1985 and continued up until his passing. The strip centered around brutal, humorless thugs … which was ironic, because Tony was kind, thoughtful, gentle and very, very funny.
I’ll miss teasing Tony about his spelling. I’ll miss ribbing him about his deadpan persona … I used to troll him with my impression of him, adopting a dour, despondent monotone to mutter: “Come in , we’re very excited, we’ve got a new kettle” … and I’ll miss ragging him about being an ever bigger name-dropper than I am (and that’s saying something!) I’ll miss his dry comebacks, putting me down immediately in return.
But really, I’ll just miss him.
I met Tony Husband once and told him how much I LOVED his work in Oink! He was stupidly humble as he was one of the funniest cartoonists I knew, with a lovely, distinctive line.
I never had to endure the poor spelling. Hooray for editors!