Tony Weare

Tony Weare (January 1, 1912 - December 2, 1994) was a comics artist best known for drawing Matt Marriott, a daily western strip written by Jim Edgar, which ran in the London Evening News from 1955 to 1977.

He was born in Wincanton, Somerset, and studied drawing at the Bournemouth School of Art but became a trooper in a cavalry regiment where he developed a love of horses. As well as Matt Marriott, he also worked at Mickey Mouse Weekly, where he worked on "Billy Brave", "Pride of the Circus", "Savage Splendour", and "Robin Alone". He was voted strip cartoonist of the year in 1961. In the 1980s he drew "Rookwood" for Look and Learn magazine and a few sequences in Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, at the invitation of Lloyd, an admirer of his work.

David Lloyd wrote about him "Tony was one of just a very few strip artists here and in the US whose creative identities owed nothing to the heritage of stylisation which influenced many other newspaper adventure strip creators - he was primarily an illustrator who just happened to love drawing strips...... He also had a superb command of light and shade, which promoted the impression that he was drawing something he could see in front of him, rather than something he'd built up from his imagination."

External links

• Tony Weare at Lambiek.net
• The Cartoon Stripped
• A Matt Marriott strip from ca. 1960 go to [1] and look for Weare in the index.