Tony Husband was a cartoonist, stand up comedian and social reformer whose gentle satire has tickled the underbelly of British society for a generation. Tony Husband was born in Blackpool on the 28 August 1950. A self-taught artist, he began a career as a freelance cartoonist in the mid 1970s after a succession of jobs including advertising and window dressing. His cartoons were published in the Daily Mirror and Punch, leading him to become a full-time cartoonist in 1984. Since then his work has continued to appear in Punch and also Private Eye, The Times, The Oldie, The Sun, The Sunday Times, Playboy, Men Only, Readers Digest and numerous publications in Germany. He won the title of Gag Cartoonist of the year in both 1986 and 1987, and Strip Cartoonist the following year.
In the meantime, he founded and co-edited Oink!, a children’s comic, from 1985-88 and with the same team, co-wrote Round the Bend, a highly-acclaimed children’s television programme which featured spitting image puppets. He also co-wrote and designed the play Save the Human with the playwright David Wood. He has published fifteen books in this country such as Use Your Head (1984), Animal Husbandry (1986), Yobs (1988) Another Pair of Underpants (1995), and ten in Germany, where he is a hugely successful cartoonist. He is also a best-selling greetings card artist with Hallmark and Carlton Cards. In 2005, Tony Husband received The Pont Award by The Cartoon Art Trust for depicting the British Way of Life, as well as a position in Who’s Who. The following year, he became Cartoonist in Residence at the Lowry in Salford, and Ebury Press published his book, The World’s Worst Jokes. Then, in 2007, the UK’s premier greeting card publishers Paper House joined forces with Tony Husband to bring his politically incorrect nuances to their Great British Card Company range.
With a unique style and often less politically encrusted subject matter than his contemporaries, Husband combined conventional social satire with his own brand of gross surrealism. Whether it is part of Husband’s long strip series, ‘Yobs’ for Private Eye, made even more relevant by the media obsession with hoodies, or one of his many examples that demonstrate his ability to produce comedy that is downright bizarre.
Since the publication of his book Take Care Son about his dad’s dementia in 2014, Husband worked extensively all over the country, on projects to raise awareness and understanding of the illness.
His book From A Dark Place: How A Family Coped With Drug Addiction (2017) chronicles his son Paul’s addiction to drugs. He has since recovered and is now a successful photographer.
In December 2019, he published a book with the author Libby Moore drawing attention to child abuse, called After…:The Impact of Child Abuse. He’s currently working on a book to raise awareness of carers of those with dementia. He has published a series of books ‘The Ups and Downs’, such as The Ups and Downs of Being a Grandparent and The Ups and Downs of Being a Husband. In 2020, Tony toured the country with poet Ian McMillan, performing a show of poetry, cartooning and improv, called 'A Cartoon History of Here'.
