Page 14 - David Burr Rooftops Winter/Spring 2021/2022

Tea and tee-hee
with a comic maestro
Richard Bryson goes for an afternoon chat with Beano cartoonist Barrie Appleby
Comic cartoonist Barrie Appleby is proof you can’t make assumptions about people. He occupies a brightly coloured world of
zany, all-action characters punctuated by capitalised cries of OuCH! SplAt! and assorted strangulated shreeks.“I still laugh at the same things I did as a kid,” he says. “It's a great pleasure to laugh as I work, interpreting a good gag from the scriptwriters.”
So bearing this in mind I anticipate meeting a non-stop joker. Instead this 70-year-old artist, while friendly and good company, is deadpan and quite serious (though you suspect there is a dry sense of humour tucked away for
appropriate moments).
He is generous with his time, giving
me lots of detail about his tough upbringing in a South Yorkshire mining community and going to a convent school. “the nuns taught well but they put the fear of god in me. And despite their teaching I learnt that the occasional lie doesn’t go amiss! One day me and another boy admitted we hadn’t said our prayers that morning and got punished for our honesty.
“I also remember wives and families waiting by the pitheads if a siren had gone off, indicating something had gone wrong down below.”
If those were sometimes gloomy formative years, drawing and art were
much needed escapes. “My earliest memory is my mother drawing a stick man and showing me how to bring it to life by doing others and then flicking the pages. I always drew, even as a child.”
Failing the 11 plus meant Barrie went to a secondary modern school, which he hated, though he liked art college where you could talk to the tutors and learn in a friendly environment.
“Being taught life drawing, calligraphy, photography and composition was all very useful,” he says. “But then I thought - do I want a degree in art? Would I want to become an art teacher . . . it wasn’t for me.”
It was becoming ever clearer Barrie ‘
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Barrie’s world; His comical take of market day in Sudbury, left, and above, feeling the noise in a comic cartoon