Joseph Wright, who has died aged 70, was a popular cartoonist and illustrator of children’s books. His humorous, off-the-wall and sometimes contentious cartoons featured in newspapers including the Guardian, Times and Independent. He illustrated books by Bamber Gascoigne, Michael Aspel and Paul Heiney, and is probably best remembered for his collaboration on the What-a-Mess children’s series with Frank Muir.
These tales about an extremely untidy, gauche and accident-prone Afghan hound, extended to more than 20 books and were adapted for television in both the UK and US. Many of the pictures included tiny images of Joe’s two young sons, Sam and Peter, who loved seeing themselves featured among the mayhem.
Joe also illustrated some of the hugely successful books by Allan Ahlberg, most notably Mr Cosmo the Conjuror (1980) and Mrs Plug the Plumber (1980) in the Happy Families series. And from 1986 onwards, he illustrated the Little Dracula series of children’s books by Martin Waddell.
These stories revolve around the macabre adventures of an endearing green child vampire who emulates his father, Big Dracula, and they were also turned into an animated US TV series. Joe’s detailed and humorous illustrations show the wildly gory details of the day-to-day family life of an apprentice vampire. We see Little Dracula drinking a glass of blood at bedtime and sleeping in a miniature coffin, and his mother emptying the brain from a severed head into a frying pan for breakfast.
Joe was born in Ulverston, Cumbria, one of seven children of Doris (nee Athersmith) and Ernest Wright, and went to Ulverston Victoria school. He enjoyed the fact that Ulverston was also the birthplace of Stan Laurel. His father served in the British army in Burma during the second world war and afterwards worked as a coalminer. When Joe was 11, his father died suddenly on Christmas Day, and he said that this tragedy left him with a dislike of the festive season.
He was determined to follow his dream to become an artist. His talent was recognised early on and he received a scholarship to attend Lancaster College of Art and then, from 1968, the Royal College of Art in London. At the RCA he was tutored by Quentin Blake, and graduated with distinction.
Joe then traipsed the streets of London with his portfolio under his arm. His first success came with the satirical magazine Punch, to which his gently witty cartoons seemed ideally suited. His individual, somewhat manic and curvaceous style makes his work instantly recognisable. Characters in his wonderfully busy tableaux are fluid almost to the point of animation.
His work regularly appeared in the Radio Times, Time Out, New Society and the New Statesman. In a weekend slot in the Times, he provided a humorous interpretation of one of a selection of snippets in the farming section. He also illustrated children’s textbooks for Oxford University Press as well as magazine covers for all the main publishing groups.
It was Blake who put him in touch with Muir when the humorist was looking for an illustrator for a children’s book he was writing about his family’s pet dog. Muir felt Joe’s cartoons perfectly suited his idea and the first What-a-Mess book appeared in 1977.
In 1995 Joe left London for a more relaxed life in rural Somerset, where he settled in the village of Mells and gradually swapped drawing topical cartoons to tight deadlines for growing marrows and courgettes, though he still contributed to the Guardian and Times. He donated satirical cartoon caricatures of all the local drinkers to the local pub, and sent personalised Christmas and birthday cards to friends and family. Joe was a bon vivant, as entertaining in real life as he was on paper, and, at 6ft 4in, the archetypal gentle giant.
He is survived by his second wife, Joan (nee Clink), whom he met in 1989; Sam and Peter, the sons of his first marriage, in 1979, to Barbara Mullarney, which ended in divorce; and three grandchildren, Luke, Ellie and Mia.
• Joseph Wright, cartoonist and illustrator, born 17 July 1947; died 6 October 2017
