Steve McGarry

• Born — 24 January 1953 • Birthplace — Wythenshawe, Manchester, England • Nationality — British • Cartoonist — y • Art — y • Write — y • Notable Works — Badlands Mullets Biographic KidTown • Website — www.stevemcgarry.com • Awards — National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Illustration Award, 2003

A former record sleeve designer, McGarry's credits include sleeve designs for Joy Division, Slaughter & The Dogs, Jilted John and John Cooper Clarke. As a story artist, he worked on the movies Despicable Me 2, Minions, The Secret Life of Pets, and on the Electronic Arts mobile game Minions Paradise.

McGarry's Western strip Badlands debuted in the short-lived British tabloid The Post in 1988, and then ran for 13 years in the British tabloid The Sun. McGarry took over the weekly illustrated biography feature Biography (distributed by United Feature Syndicate) in 1989; it ran until 1991. He produced a similar strip, called Pop Culture, in the British newspaper Today from 1993 to 1996. In 2005 he launched the weekly feature Biographic, syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate/Universal Uclick/Andrews McMeel Syndication ever since. With illustrator Rick Stromoski, McGarry created the comic strip Mullets, syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate, which ran a little over a year, from 2003 to 2005. McGarry started KidCity in 2001 for United Feature Syndicate. Now with Andrews McMeel Syndication and known as KidTown, the weekly feature teaches kids how to read a newspaper using trivia and puzzle features.

In 2004, The Gallery at Art Institute of California, Orange County, stage a three-month retrospective exhibition of his work, “Steve McGarry: A Survey of Cartoons and Illustrations”. In 2014, the record sleeve that McGarry designed for the 1978 Joy Division EP An Ideal for Living went on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2018, he designed and curated an exhibition tracing the history of soccer comics, cartoons, and illustration around the world. "Playing For A Draw" debuted at the National Football Museum in Manchester, where it ran for three months before transferring to The Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal as part of the 2018 Lakes International Comic Arts Festival. In May 2019, the exhibition was staged at the Huntington Beach Art Center in Huntington, Beach, California, as part of the inaugural NCSFest. McGarry is the founder and Director of NCSFest. The inaugural event was staged in Huntington Beach, 17–19 May 2019 and featured more than 100 internationally acclaimed cartoonists and comics creators, family zones, a marketplace, seminars, workshops and four international art exhibitions.

His twin sons, Joe and Luke McGarry, form the indie music duo Pop Noir. Under the name Fantastic Heat Brothers, they are also award-winning artists, designers and animators in their own right. Much of their output is centered around Luke McGarry's cartoon artwork.