One of Roy Davis popular captionless cartoons

The inventive and award-winning creator Roy Davis -- cartoonist, comic-strip artist and writer and illustrator -- was the genius behind some 10,000 stories for children. He continued to contribute stories to various titles well into his seventies.

His credits included many titles across the years, his aptitide for drawing recognised at school by his headmaster, accordng to his obituary by Mark Bryant published in The Independent (registration required). Indeed, it was his headmaster who predicted he would one day be published in Punch -- which he was, although his first published cartoon appeared in the weekly magazine Answers in 1939, when Davis was working for the London wallpaper designers Arthur Sanderson & Sons.

For a time after the Second World War (when he served in the RAF Regiment) he worked as a "storyman", helping to devise scripts for animated films at J. Arthur Rank's Gaumont British Animation studio in Cookham, near Maidenhead, Berkshire. In 1950, when G.B. Animation closed, he became a strip cartoonist, working for publications such as Punch, Tatler, the Daily Mirror -- and both wrote and drew strips for Mickey Mouse Weekly, Sun, Comet and Sunny Stories.

Influenced by Heath Robinson and Rowland Emett, he worked mainly in pen and indian ink. His joke and strip cartoons were often captionless.

He joined IPC Magazines in 1964, writing numerous scripts for Whizzer & Chips, Shiver & Shake, Knockout, Princess Tina, Buster and others, leaving in 1974 to go freelance, although still working for the company, until he retired in 1992.

Davis was one of the founders of the Cartoonists' Club of Great Britain, and, later, was also a member of the British Cartoonists' Association.

Those who worked with him recall he was very inventive with his scripts. He wrote Vampire Brats for Buster in the early 1990's, drawn by Lew Stringer. Stringer recalls he was very inventive with his strip. "Being a cartoonist himself he used to sketch out the strips on A3 paper and dialogue each panel, rather than type out the scripts. This was ideal as you knew the story would work visually, unlike some non-artist scriptwriters who have multiple things happening in one panel that would make an awkward if not impossible composition."