Mike Williams

About

Mike Williams was born in Liverpool on 24 February 1940, he attended Quarry Bank Grammar School. A self-taught artist, he started work in Henry Pybus and Littlewoods commercial art studios in Liverpool in 1957, but became a freelance cartoonist in 1966. His elder brother, Pete Williams, also became a cartoonist. In 1967 Williams sold his his first drawing to Punch, and his cartoons have also appeared in Private Eye, Spectator, Playboy, Daily Sketch, Oldie, The Times, and Sun. He has also deputised for JAK in the Mail on Sunday.

Advertising work has played an important part in Williams' career and his clients have ranged from BMW and Guinness to the Julius Baer Bank, for which he created the polar-bear image. In addition, he has produced greetings cards for Valentine's of Edinburgh and the Ink Group (Australia). In 1997 he was briefly Cartoon Editor of Punch. He is an admirer of Mankoff, Grosz, Michael Maslin, and the artists of the New Yorker. Mike Williams works in pencil, pen and watercolour.

• Mark Bryant Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Cartoonists and Caricaturists (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000), pp.242-4.