Tony Husband, who has died aged 73, was the cartoonist behind one of Britain’s longest running comic strips, The Yobs, a new episode appearing every fortnight for 38 years since 1985, on the seemingly uninspiring subject of bovver boys with IQs as low as their brows. “I was beaten up by a bunch of skinheads,” Husband told the Observer in 2001, “so maybe this was my way of getting back at them.” He had submitted a cartoon to Private Eye of two skinheads spray-painting graffiti on a wall, one of them asking “How do you spell NF?”
The magazine’s editor Ian Hislop then suggested that they use “the yob figures that you do a lot” in a three-panel strip called The Yobs; later it appeared as Yobs, or sometimes Yobettes. It was named strip cartoon of the year in 1987 by the Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain, who had already chosen Husband as best gag cartoonist in 1985 and 1986, and would reward him many more times.
