A generation of children grew up giggling to comic strips in Sparky and Whizzer & Chips, drawn by my father, Les Barton, who has died aged 84. He was also a prolific cartoon artist, his gags - populated by wide-eyed folk and often signed Lezz - appearing regularly from the mid-1950s in Punch, Private Eye, the Daily Sketch, Daily Mirror and the Spectator.
The character he made his own from the late 1960s was I-Spy, in a serial in Sparky about a special agent whose face was hidden but whose cloak concealed myriad gadgets, used in animated fashion. He also drew Ma Kelly's Telly, about valve-shaped people who masterminded programmes inside a TV set and, for IPC, Harry's Haunted House and Billy Bunter when the regular artists were indisposed. Later, as IPC tried to re-energise the waning comic market with the irreverent Oink! (a junior Viz), he crafted the Slugs, about a punk band.
A founder member of the Cartoonists' Club of Great Britain in 1960, with a then unknown Ronald Searle, he became treasurer for 20 years. Friends and contemporaries included Chic Jacob, Larry (Terry Parkes) and Bill Tidy. He encouraged many young cartoonists to persevere in this most unsecure profession.
Dad left school at 14 and was a dispatch rider with the Royal Corps of Signals as D-day neared. A motorcycle accident led him to retrain as a draughtsman, and as a self-taught artist, he began submitting cartoons to publications in his spare time during a posting to Lagos, Nigeria.
After the second world war he became a process artist for Associated-Iliffe Press, but evenings were spent producing 20 cartoons a week, the first for Reveille in 1949, which earned him a princely £7. He worked as a war artist for the Sun during the Falklands conflict, thanks to a dearth of photos in the early stages.
He worked well into his 80s, having diversified into greetings cards and revisiting his talent for caricature as an on-the-spot artist at corporate events. He loved having an audience, once describing the best as "intelligent, well educated and a little drunk".
He is survived by my mother, Dorothy, myself, and my siblings, Lisa, Peter and Samantha.
