We’re sorry to report the recent passing of the brilliant absurdist cartoonist Glen Baxter.
Known affectionately as “Colonel Baxter” by his admirers, Glen Baxter is celebrated for his whimsical and surreal artistry, which often blends absurdist humour with cryptic narratives. Drawing inspiration from pulp fiction, vintage textbooks, and the eccentricities of daily life, his works provoke both laughter and contemplation.
The much appreciated cartoonist died from carcinomatosis on 29th March 2026, aged 82, The Times reported.
In a tribute, The Flowers Gallery, which has represented international contemporary artists and estates since 1970, notes Glen Baxter studied at Leeds College of Art before moving to London, where he taught at the Victoria & Albert Museum in the late 1960s and Goldsmiths from 1974 to 1986.
Baxter first read his own poetry in 1974 at St. Mark’s Church, New York, before developing his distinctive drawing style, which combines imagery and text in the format of a single cell graphic panel. Presenting a precise, gently absurd tension between language and image, his acclaimed practice was informed through his own early struggles with speech.
“For those who have the misfortune to stammer, certain words and letters can induce dread,” he noted. “Strategies are developed and this is how I began to circumvent the everyday trauma of trying to achieve fluency of speech. Each element of language has to be rearranged. At times resulting in unusual sentence formations.
“This was the world I took with me to art school, where I discovered that this fitted in perfectly with André Breton’s description of Surrealism. I was happy to discover I was not alone, and this newfound freedom allowed me to explore the combinations of words and images that were to become the bedrock of what we now know as a Glen Baxter drawing.”
Deriving material from varied sources such as pulp fiction, adventure stories, cowboys, objects and foodstuffs with names that he found intriguing, Baxter worked with a number of recurring personas who contemplate life’s big and small questions in incongruous scenarios at once familiar and surreal, including the great outdoors, art galleries, and the dinner table.
Based in London, he was a regular contributor to The New Yorker and exhibited internationally, with his work in the collections of Tate and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Sell-out publications of his work include New Ways with Vegetables and Other Disasters (2021).
“Over nearly six decades, Glen Baxter created an absurdist alternate reality through his masterfully deadpan line drawings. Usually captioned and hand-coloured, his artwork utilised humor to challenge cultural seriousness, with a wink to Dada,” notes Modernism inc.
“Baxter resisted the pressures of abstraction, drawing instead from an array of sources such as the Marx Brothers and Alfred Jarry to André Breton and Max Ernst. Baxter’s work transformed the visual language of British adventure books and Surrealist juxtaposition into a uniquely subversive idiom that exposed the absurdities of both everyday life and the art world itself. In
Glen Baxter, 4th March 1944 – 29th March 2026
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John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.
He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.
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