Roger Hargreaves

British cartoonist

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History

Roger Hargreaves (born 1935, Cleckheaton, Yorkshire, Eng.—died Sept. 12, 1988, Kent county) was a British cartoonist who created whimsical characters best known in the popular Mr. Men series of books for children.

Hargreaves was a creative director in an London advertising firm when he began to market his potato-shaped doodles in the early 1970s. The simple figures were given such names as Mr. Tickle, Mr. Happy, Mr. Nosey, Mr. Greedy, and Mr. Grumpy. These characters appeared in books, as BBC cartoons, and in a comic strip in the Daily Mirror. The Mr. Men characters spawned more than 700 products, from T-shirts to food cartons, and paved the way for a Little Miss series, including Little Miss Helpful and Little Miss Bossy. Together the two series reached worldwide sales of 85 million volumes and were published in 20 languages.

Hargreave’s family of characters were joined by Agatha Christie’s fictional sleuths Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple when four of the British crime novelist’s works, including Murder at the Vicarage (1930) and Death on the Nile (1937), were adapted for children in 2025–26. The first of these new titles were titled Little Miss Marple: Muddle at the Vicarage and Mr Poirot: Mischief on the Nile. The adaptations featured reimagined versions of the iconic detectives in Hargreave’s style, and their narratives were reworked to delight young readers, replacing murder with lighthearted mystery.