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The genius of the cartoonist Glen Baxter was the happy result of a childhood in postwar Leeds – periods of dreariness interspersed with trips to the local cinema to watch black-and-white cowboy B-movies, and afternoons spent reading Boy’s Own annuals and the adventures of Dan Dare in Eagle comics – combined with an artistic education influenced by Magritte and André Breton.

Glen, who has died aged 82, was celebrated in Britain and the US for his cartoons, which appeared in publications including the New Yorker and the Observer, as well as being a staple of the humorous greetings card rack, and he was hailed in Europe as a master surrealist. He embraced the influences of his youth by pastiching the macho cowboys and heroic spacemen from the pages of his comics, but his characters, whether wearing tweed, a 10-gallon hat, or perhaps even a wimple, would find themselves in bizarre, pop art-inspired settings, accompanied by the deadpan, witty captions that became his trademark.

In childhood, Glen had struggled with a bad stammer. His embarrassment was exacerbated by the regular errands his mother would send him on; his panic and inability to form the right words would often mean he returned with the wrong item, or visited the wrong shop altogether. It was then, he said, that he embraced surrealism. At art school, he resisted being compartmentalised into the fashions of abstraction. He loved the collages of Max Ernst, and found that by using coloured pencils he could recreate the soft quality of the colours of his beloved Boy’s Own.

Born in Leeds, West Yorkshire, Glen was the son of Charlie Baxter, a welder, and his wife, Florence (nee Wood). A precocious artistic talent was evident from nursery school, and after attending Cockburn high school in Beeston, he studied painting and lithography at Leeds College of Art, graduating in 1965. He moved south to Leytonstone, east London, where he taught briefly at a local primary school, and then at the V&A in 1967.

In the late 1960s, he grew disillusioned with the world of art and began writing poetry and working with alternative theatre groups in London, writing scripts and performing.

In 1970, he met Carole Turner in Islington, where he was teaching at the local Starcross school. In the same year, Glen submitted a collection of poems and short stories to Adventures in Poetry, a magazine edited by Larry Fagin at the Poetry Project in New York City. He was quickly invited to New York to read his poetry at St Mark’s church on the Lower East Side, a famous bohemian venue.

He met artists and film-makers who encouraged him to show drawings alongside his poetry, and in 1974, Glen had the first exhibition of his artwork, at the Gotham Book Mart gallery. In the same year, the gallery published his work in two little magazines, Fruits of the World in Danger and The Handy Guide to Amazing People. An early patron was the American writer and illustrator Edward Gorey, who bought 10 of Glen’s drawings and once said of him that “Mr Baxter betrays all the ominous symptoms of genius”.

Back in London, Glen worked part-time at Goldsmiths, University of London, while continuing to develop his writing and drawing style. Upon returning from another trip to the US in 1978, he began to experiment with combining words and images in the format that he became renowned for. His first illustrative work appeared in 1979 with a collection, Atlas, published in Amsterdam by De Hermonie (in black and white, because colour printing was too expensive).

The following year, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London exhibited a small selection of his work, which was reviewed favourably by the Guardian and the Times, and attention snowballed.

Collections of his work included The Impending Gleam (1981), Jodhpurs in the Quantocks (1986), The Collected Blurtings of Baxter and The Further Blurtings of Baxter (both 1994), The Wonder Book of Sex (1995), Blizzards of Tweed (1999) and Trundling Grunts (2002). In 2016, the New York Review of Books published Almost Completely Baxter: New and Selected Blurtings.

When Bob Gottlieb, editor-in-chief at Alfred A Knopf, Glen’s American publishers, took over as editor of the New Yorker in 1987, he urged Glen to submit cartoons for publication. Thus began an association with the magazine that would last until his death.

Glen later found great success with greetings cards and merchandise including ceramics and even wristwatches. The Chris Beetles Gallery in London, of which I am a director, hosted the launch of Glen Baxter’s Gourmet Guide in 1997, as well as the exhibitions Blizzards of Tweed (1999), Trundling Grunts (2002) and, most recently, The Chaotic Cortex: The Surreal Worlds of John Glashan and Glen Baxter (2024), in which his work appeared alongside that of Glashan, the great Observer cartoonist. Between 2012 and 2025, Glen held exhibitions at the Flowers Gallery in London.

He is survived by Carole and their five children, Zoe, Harry, Jo, Giles and Gaby.

• Glen Baxter, cartoonist, born 4 March 1944; died 29 March 2026