Among his best-known creations are the Beano strips Little Plum, Minnie the Minx, The Bash Street Kids, and The Three Bears.
[1] After serving in the RAF, he took his first job as an artist for the local Lancashire Evening Post drawing adverts and cartoons.
[1] In 1952, he began freelance work for the children's comic publishers DC Thomson, creating several highly popular new strips for The Beano including Little Plum,[2] Minnie the Minx[2] (started in 1953, taken over by Jim Petrie in 1961), The Three Bears, and The Bash Street Kids[2][3] (initially called When the Bell Rings).
To facilitate his work for DC Thomson, Baxendale relocated to the publisher's location city of Dundee, Scotland.
Baxendale's time with D.C. Thomson came to an abrupt end in 1962 when, overburdened with work, he in his own words "just blew up like an old boiler" and left.
The Swots and the Blots always had wit and a sense of style, but it reached a new standard of excellence when Baxendale began drawing it for the new-look Smash!
and continuing in its successor, Valiant and Smash, with some fill-ins by Les Barton), by adopting a new style, one which influenced many others in the comics field, just as his earlier The Beano work had done; and in the process attaining a new, deliriously daft, high standard, one rarely approached by other strips.
By the time he began working on Bad Penny his drawing style had matured, with an equal concentration on developing a zany but tight storyline, less emphasis on close-ups of facial expressions, but retaining the essentials needed to put over a character's own personality traits.
For instance, for strips like Bad Penny and Grimly Feendish, Baxendale pencilled the drawings, and Mike Brown, an animator by trade, inked them in.
[1] Baxendale left the world of mainstream British children's comics in 1975, creating the more adult-orientated Willy the Kid series,[2] published by Duckworths.
In the 1980s he fought a seven-year legal battle with DC Thomson for the rights to his Beano creations, which was eventually settled out of court.
[1] For a year before he fully retired from cartooning to concentrate on publishing in 1992, Baxendale drew I Love You Baby Basil!
Though it had some paying subscribers, including fellow Vietnam War opponent Noam Chomsky, Baxendale made a considerable loss from sending hundreds of free weekly copies to Labour Party MPs.
[15][16] Andy Fanton, who at the time of Baxendale's death was the Beano's writer for several Baxendale-created strips, lauded his predecessor as "the godfather of so much of what we do".