Rockets Passing Overhead reproduced from The Captain Star Omnibus. © Steven Appleby
Steven Appleby is a cartoonist and illustrator living in Britain. He is a dual citizen of the UK and Canada. His humour is usually observational or absurd.
His work first appeared in the NME in 1984 with the Rockets Passing Overhead comic strip about Captain Star, which was made into an animated cartoon series in 1997. Rockets Passing Overhead also appeared in The Observer, Zeit Magazin, and various comics in the UK, Europe and America, and was collected in the Captain Star Omnibus book. Other comic strips appeared in many publications including The Times and the Sunday Telegraph. The strip Loomus can currently be seen in The Guardian. His work has also appeared on album covers, most notably on Trompe le Monde by the Pixies.
His series of cartoons called Steven Appleby's Normal Life was successful enough not only to be translated into German and published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, but also to be made into a radio series for BBC Radio 4. An earlier series, Small Birds Singing, which ran for eight years in The Times, concerned itself with the usually surreal doings of the occupants of an English country house.
Appleby has also had many exhibitions of paintings, published over 20 books and collaborated on a musical play, Crocs In Frocks (with Teresa Early and Roger Gosling), which was staged in Camberwell and at the ICA, London in 2006.
