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Roy (Mitch) Mitchell, 1946-2010
posted November 4, 2010
A note from the cartoonist
Roy Mitchell's daughter
on the UK comics site Peter Gray's Cartoons And Comics indicates that Mitchell, who signed his work "Mitch," died on May 23 from complications related to bowel cancer. He was 64 years old.
A lengthy obituary at Steve Holland's excellent site Bear Alley paints a picture of Mitchell's decades-long career, where he drew thousands of cartoons for dozens of clients, ranging from humor publications to card companies to corporations to newspapers at home and abroad. He drew several features of IPC's humour titles in the 1980s and into the 1990s, including the titles
Micro Mates,
Freddy 3-D, and
Paper Boy.
His longest, most dependable outlet may have been two features, one called
The Chalks And Cheeses and the other
God Is..., which appeared in the Salvation Army's publication
The War Cry for more than 20 years starting in the 1970s. There were three
God Is... collections, two from a division of HarperCollins and one in full-color published to benefit a pair of cancer treatment centers. He published several other books, and published
in several additional ones; the majority of his solo efforts seemed to have been in the Christian milieu.
Mitchell was at one time a school teacher, and ran both multiple seminars on cartoon-making and a home-studies course. Holland notes that he also sange lead for a band called The Cadillacs at points during its 40-year history. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2007.