Steven Appleby

Steven Appleby
Steven Appleby at the 2014 Literary Kitchen Festival
Born	(1956-01-27) January 27, 1956 (age 61)

Steven Appleby (born 27 January 1956) is an absurdist cartoonist, illustrator and artist living in Britain. He is a dual citizen of the UK and Canada. His humour has been described as “observational or absurd, with a keen sense of the turmoil of fear and obsession that teems beneath the respectable exterior of most of us.”

His work first appeared in the New Musical Express in 1984 with the Rockets Passing Overhead comic strip about the character Captain Star, which also appeared in The Observer, Zeit Magazin (Germany), as well as other newspapers and comics in the UK, Europe and America. Other comic strips followed in many publications including The Times, the Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian. Appleby’s work has also appeared on album covers, most notably Trompe le Monde by the Pixies.

His comic strip Steven Appleby's Normal Life was translated into German and published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and also made into a radio series for BBC Radio 4. An earlier comic strip, Small Birds Singing, ran for eight years in The Times.

Appleby has also had numerous exhibitions of drawings & paintings, written and drawn many books, and collaborated on a musical play, Crocs In Frocks.

The oldest of four children, Steven Appleby was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1956 and grew up in Wooler, near the Scottish border.

Appleby recalls a childhood spent making camps, climbing trees, and hoisting flags outdoors, and reading books such as Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. The worlds of cartoonists such as Ronald Searle (St Trinian’s) and Charles Addams (The Addams Family), found on his parents’ bookshelves, also made an impression on him as a child.

In an interview with The Guardian, Appleby describes his mother, Ibbie, as coming ‘... from Canada, a distant land of snow and french toast, far away across the sea, where she skated and skied in the day and danced to big bands by night.’ Towards the end of the Second World War, having fallen in love with Steven’s father, Walter, she came to Britain on a convoy. ‘She travelled alone to live with my father’s family in a tiny village on the coast of north Northumberland while he was still away flying planes in Burma. Together, after the war, they bred boxer dogs, performed with the village amateur dramatic society and laughed at The Goon Show on the wireless.’