CapeZoneCapeZoneCreator/D.C. Thomson
Not to be confused with British artist Barry Appleby.
Barrie Appleby has 15 credited comics indexed across 12 series, working as cover, penciller, inker, colorist, letterer.
Barrie was born in Moreton, Wallasey, Cheshire, the son of Kenneth J Appleby and Olive (née Jones). His mother came from Birkenhead and his father worked on a minesweeper in Liverpool. They were married two weeks after meeting in early 1941. The family moved across the Pennines after the war and Barrie grew up in Grimethorpe, South Yorkshire. He left school at 15 and went to Barnsley Art College but left before his final exams. He then started work in a glassworks but really wanted to draw cartoons. He saw a copy of a Walt Disney comic in a shop and wrote to them. He took a job with them in London aged 17 as an art assistant doing cut and paste jobs on artwork that mostly came in from America as well as a few drawings for the letters page. He then had a job as a layout artist with IPC Magazines and supplemented his income with freelance cartoon work. By this time he was married to Eileen and they moved to Toronto where he worked for a book publisher eventually becoming Art Director. He then moved to a textbook publishing company, also as art director. Two children arrived and they decided to move back to England as the job had become more administrative than creative. He set up a studio and agency in Essex with two friends, one of them had contacts with D.C. Thomson which then led to work ghosting other artists there. In around 1980 Barrie and the family moved to Suffolk, near Sudbury. In the 1970s he drew ‘Terror TV’, ‘Teddy Scare’ and ‘Starr Tour’ for IPC. He created ‘Cuddles and Dimples’ in The Dandy from 1986 to 2004 by joining together two previously separate strips. He was one of the artists of ‘Dennis the Menace’ and ‘Roger the Dodger’ and also with ‘Pirates of the Caribeano’, ‘London B412’, ‘Gnasher and Gnipper’ and ‘Fun Kids’. He drew ‘Bananaman’ for the BEEB comic and Dandy, succeeding original artist John Geering. Beginning in 1985 he drew several strips for Marvel’s ‘The Get Along Gang’. In the early 1990s he became an independent freelance artist. Surprisingly, considering his chosen profession, Barrie is colour blind and has difficulty distinguishing green, brown and pink and so does most of his work in black and white. He enjoys working with colour on commissioned work but sometimes needs advice on the correct colour.
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