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Tony Reeve had a perfect cartoon style – big nosed. Instantly comic yet able to accommodate a good likeness of a celebrity and cover fashions, be it grunge, power dressing or something more yummy mummy. He was also very funny. The gags sharp and – this is the acid test – simple to discribe. For example one which appeared first in the 1996 Cartoonist newspaper and was rapidly collected by Charles Saatchi, apppearing in his recent i am an Artoholic book. A Damien Hirst shark in a glass tank. On the left an Eskimo is saying to a trendy art goer, ‘My five year old son could do that.’ Timeless. Yet such easily drawn wit didn’t come easy. Tony was born 4th july 1961 in Havering, Romford, later raised in Chelmsford. After problems with his eyes and gait he was diagnosed with Marfan’s syndrome. Marfan’s is a sly time bomb of a genetic condition. The body, having failed to lay down enough connective tissue, leaves organs without enough ‘padding’. The regular buffeting of life, breathing, moving, looking, is enough to, typically, weaken heart, arteries and dislocate the lens in the eye. Without modern medicine you were lucky to get past 30. To watch Tony draw was to see him battle that fate and to be in awe of the humour that flowed despite. It was a struggle. A clipboard of A4 would rest on his boney knees. Crane-like elongation of the limbs is another symptom. He would hang over the sheets of paper. Drawing over and over in an almost animation style. All the time simplifying, sharpening but uncannily retaining the looseness of his first rough. If he was having a poor eye day, and the ‘floaters’ were bad, he’d be forced to change the pairings of contact lens and 2 or 3 pairs of glasses, just to snatch a few seconds of clarity for drawing. Some cartoonists have The Groucho as their Club, Tony had Moorfields Eye Hospital instead. However his work stood out to editors. Though unconfident about it, by the mid eighties he had broken into Punch and been noticed by his peers. By the mid nineties he was a regular in David Thomas’s Punch and a mainstay in later noughties punch revivals. His real love though was Lord Gnome. The invention of first faxes then e mail meant he could stay up late with trash television or cult box sets of the Prisioner, Department X, Man in a Suitcase or The Saint and finesse the drawing and fret about news stories. Sending sometimes 2am or 3am last minute gags to Private The same patient nailing down of topical stories and figures had him successfully scriptwrite for 2DTV and create a long running 1995\6 Independent newspaper strip, Generation Why. Sadly, the easiest strip to research was the Eye’s recently run, Off Your Trolley, constant poking at changing NHS policies. By 2005 onwards the health spiral was downwards, the heart ops many and the recoveries slow. His consultants that strove to keep him alive loved the strip. There are not many people who come out of a heart op who are told ‘I have an idea you can draw up.’ His last gag, dictated from the hospital bed in critical care when it was clear a third heart failure in recent times would be too much, duly ran in the Eye on October 14th, sharp, funny and on the book page. He had managed to sneak another one in age 50, just to underline that Marfan’s cursed Syndrome didnt stop him achieving, if not exceeding, his potential as an artist.
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