Tony Weare was a comics

Comics

Comics denotes a hybrid medium having verbal side of its vocabulary tightly tied to its visual side in order to convey narrative or information only, the latter in case of non-fiction comics, seeking synergy by using both visual and verbal side in...

 artist best known for drawing Matt Marriott, a daily western

Western (genre)

The Western is a genre of various visual arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of...

 strip written by Jim Edgar, which ran in The Evening News

Evening News (London)

Evening News, formerly known as The Evening News, was an evening newspaper published in London from 1881 to 1980, reappearing briefly in 1987. It became highly popular under the control of the Harmsworth brothers. For a long time it maintained the largest daily sale of any evening newspaper in London...

 from 1955 to 1977.

Tony Weare was born at Wincanton

Wincanton

Wincanton is a small town in south Somerset, southwest England. The town lies on the A303 road, the main route between London and South West England, and has some light industry...

, Somerset

Somerset

The ceremonial and non-metropolitan county of Somerset in South West England borders Bristol and Gloucestershire to the north, Wiltshire to the east, Dorset to the south-east, and Devon to the south-west. It is partly bounded to the north and west by the Bristol Channel and the estuary of the...

, and studied drawing at the Bournemouth

Bournemouth

Bournemouth is a large coastal resort town in the ceremonial county of Dorset, England. According to the 2001 Census the town has a population of 163,444, making it the largest settlement in Dorset. It is also the largest settlement between Southampton and Plymouth...

 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 illustrated "The Colditz Story" for Junior Express and was voted Serious Strip Cartoonist of the Year, 1961. In the 1980s he drew "Rookwood" for Look and Learn magazine and a few sequences in Alan Moore

Alan Moore

Alan Oswald Moore is an English writer primarily known for his work in comic books, a medium where he has produced a number of critically acclaimed and popular series, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell...

 and David Lloyd

David Lloyd (comic artist)

David Lloyd is a British comics artist best known as the illustrator of the story V for Vendetta, written by Alan Moore.-Career:...

's V for Vendetta

V for Vendetta

V for Vendetta is a ten-issue comic book series written by Alan Moore and illustrated mostly by David Lloyd, set in a dystopian future United Kingdom imagined from the 1980s to about the 1990s. A mysterious masked revolutionary who calls himself "V" works to destroy the totalitarian government,...

, 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
• http://www.art4comics.com/comicstripart.htm and look for Weare in the index.