Les Barton: Cartoonist and illustrator whose work encompassed magazines, newspapers and children's comics

A highly successful and prolific artist, Les Barton was probably best known for his distinctive cartoons for Punch, Private Eye, The Spectator, The Oldie and other publications.

However, he also wrote and illustrated comic strips for DC Thomson and IPC magazines and designed humorous greetings cards, especially those featuring cats and other animals.

Barton was born in 1923 in Wareham, Dorset, the eldest son of Alfred Barton, a sergeant-major in the Tank Corps, and his wife Violet. He had two younger brothers, Gordon and Basil. Growing up in north London, he attended Vaughan Road School in Harrow, leaving aged 14 to work as a telegraph clerk in Notting Hill. During the Second World War he served from 1942 as a dispatch rider with the Royal Corps of Signals attached to the 185th Infantry Brigade, delivering messages across Britain to Army units on manoeuvres.

It was during this period that his first published cartoons, political drawings signed simply "BARTON", appeared in the Militant Miner in 1944. He also performed as a ventriloquist at Army concerts and later published a collection of cartoons, Miles of Smiles (1946), based on jokes from his act.

In the run-up to D-Day he was attached to 2nd War Office Signals at Dover. However, after a serious motorcycle accident he was transferred to Scarborough to train as a military draughtsman. Having completed his course in 1945 he was then sent to Nigeria, with the rank of Lance Corporal, to replace another draughtsman who was being demobbed. Based at Nigeria Signal Squadron, Lancaster Barracks, Yaba, near Lagos, he was invoved with work producing communications diagrams and graphs, as well as posters and Royal Signals Christmas cards. By 1946 he was also contributing cartoons regularly to Royal Signals Magazine and the newly launched West African Magazine, or WAM.

Demobilised in 1947, he returned to London and got a job as a "process artist" for Iliffes – publishers of magazines such as Autocar, Electrical Trader, Motor Transport, Farmer & Stockbreeder and Motor Cycle. Here, for £5 a week, he worked with an airbrush retouching photographs, designing advertisements and producing commercial art drawings but also contributing cartoons to many of the Iliffes publications (including political cartoons for The Statist).

In 1949, while still working at Iliffes, he sold his first cartoon to Reveille for £7. Soon afterwards he also began to contribute to Everybody's, Blighty, Daily Sketch and the London Evening Standard and his first cartoon for Punch was published in 1954. In the late 1960s, he sold his first major strip cartoon, "Granny and Her Scooter", to DC Thomson (publishers of The Beano and other children's comics), followed by the highly successful "I Spy" for Sparky comic.

In 1970, he left Iliffes to concentrate on cartoons and comic strips, including the popular "Harry's Haunted House" and "Billy Bunter" for IPC. He also contributed drawings to Tit Bits, Men Only, Sporting Record, Nursing Mirror, Money Observer, Truth and the Daily Mirror, and was staff war artist on The Sun during the Falklands War (1982). In addition, he designed a great many humorous greetings cards for publishers such as Camden Graphics, Rainbow Cards and Cardtoons, and drew on-the-spot caricatures at business functions.

As well as producing two more collections of his own work – The Best of Barton (1960) and Just Joking! (1997) – he illustrated a number of books, including The World's Best Monster Joke Book (1983) and The Most Awful Monster Joke Book Ever (1985) by the popular children's writer Joel Rothman, and Baxter vs. the Bookies (2004) and More Baxter vs. the Bookies (2007) by Roy Granville.

A self-taught artist, Les Barton drew with a sketchy, uneven line in pen and Indian ink and watercolour. His figures – whether human or animal – had distinctive staring circular eyes with the pupils dead centre, and his signature, in letterspaced capitals, was often written in a wave pattern (he also used to sign his work "Lezz").

A member of the British Cartoonists' Association, he was also one of the founder members of the Cartoonists' Club of Great Britain in 1960, and later served as its Honorary Treasurer for more than 20 years (1972-93). Examples of his work are held in the collection of the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent and some of his cartoons were included in major national exhibitions, including "Private Eye Times, 1961-1996" (National Portrait Gallery) and "Private Eye at 45" (Cartoon Museum), as well as the British Cartoonists' Association shows in Bratislava (Slovakia), Zemun (Serbia), the Muzeum Karykatury in Warsaw, the German embassy in London and elsewhere.

Of medium height, bespectacled and clean-shaven with originally brown hair, he spoke with a strong London accent and liked to wear bow ties. In addition he was a keen supporter of Arsenal football club and enjoyed oil painting.

Leslie Alfred Barton, cartoonist and comic artist: born Wareham, Dorset 8 December 1923; married 1950 Dorothy (Dot) Popham (two sons, two daughters); died Hayes, Middlesex 20 October 2008.