Following a brief illness, Larry Wright died Sunday, May 21, 2017, according to his longtime employer The Detroit News. He was 77.

Wright's professional political cartoonist career kicked off in 1960 at the Okinawa Morning Star, an English-language daily newspaper, while he was stationed there during his Army service. He stayed at the paper after his Army discharge as a night news editor and editorial cartoonist before returning to his native Detroit, where he began drawing a daily political cartoon for the Detroit Free Press. In 1976 he took a full-time position, which he maintained in various forms until 2009 while continuing to draw editorial cartoons.

In addition to his full-time paper positions, Wright created multiple syndicated comic series, including the Wright Angles strip (collected as Motley Classics on GoComics) from 1976-1990 and the single-panel cartoon Kit 'N' Carlyle from 1980 until his retirement on November 7, 2015. Both comics are known for pairing humans with whimsical cats and contrasting their species-centric points of view.

Wright's work won him two National Cartoonist Society Editorial Cartoon Awards, the first in 1980 and the second in1984.

Mr. Wright is survived by his wife of 55 years, his son, his daughter, and four grandchildren.