Exhibition Preview: Trog, Flook – and Humph too, The Cartoon Museum, London, until April 28 2013

When legendary satirist Wally Fawkes – aka Trog – retired from the Sunday Telegraph in 2005, he was ending his 62-year career in cartoons at perhaps the most moderate of all the publications to have enlisted his rapier services.

Flook, his best-known character, earned prominence at the end of the 1940s within the pages of the Daily Mail, who Trog initially abated with column-breaking cartoons by Humphrey Lyttelton, his fellow wry-eyed illustrator and lifelong friend.

Alan Coren, the editor who oversaw their stint at Punch, described Fawkes and Lyttelton – or Humph, as he signed his works – as “two brilliant polymaths”, initially united by a love of New Orleans jazz and cartooning.

Lyttelton invited Fawkes to play clarinet in his newly-formed band in 1948 and, despite Fawkes departing to concentrate on his art eight years later, the pair remained as devoted to parping and harmonising as they did to their drawings during the decades which followed.

The similarities between jazz and art par excellence have frequently been noted by artists. Fawkes cites each field’s particular ability to produce “‘variations which bring out rather than mask the original melody, which comment on its essential qualities.”

The bone structure of a face, he feels, is “like the chord sequence which underpins a melody”, and the disparity of some of the publications enamoured by his vision is notable: the Observer (for whom he courted controversy thanks to some controversial depictions of the Queen), the New Statesman, The Times and Private Eye have been among them, portraying figures such as George Best, Francis Bacon, George Melly, Michael Jackson and Brigitte Bardot.

More than 120 cartoons, cartoon strips and caricatures appear here. The latter, says Raymond Briggs, are the most riveting.

“There is an astonishing sharp focus, particularly in the caricatures,” he says.

“It makes the characters seem larger than life, as if seen under a brilliant light and a powerful lens.”

• Open 10.30am-5.30pm (12pm-5.30pm Sunday, closed March 12). Admission £3-£5.50 (free for under-18s). Follow the museum on Twitter @Cartoonmuseumuk. Read all about Wally Fawkes’ career at The British Cartoon Archive's biography of Trog.

More pictures: