Revenge of the Librarians

Un interviu cu ilustratorul Tom Gauld despre umor, cărți și provocările/satisfacțiile superputerii sale de povestitor vizual.

Tom Gauld - Revenge of the Librarians (Amazon.de / Cărturești / BooksExpress.ro)

Bună dimineața! Sper ca interviul de mai jos - dar mai ales ilustrațiile! - să-ți facă ziua și săptămâna mai bune. Ori măcar să le începi cu un zâmbet.

Da, Biblioteca Exploratorilor s-a redeschis azi, după o absență lungă, cu poate cea mai potrivită carte: albumul Revenge of the Librarians, al lui Tom Gauld, ilustratorul caricaturist al The Guardian și New Scientist. Așa cum i-am și spus, creațiile sale sunt pentru mine aproape nonficțiune, căci surprind perfect povești reale din viața iubitorilor de cărți ori a oamenilor de știință. Am vorbit despre umor, lectură, creație și inspirație, și blănoșii lângă care citim și lucrăm. Sper să-ți placă - atât articolul text, cât și podcastul de mai jos (iar în curând episoadele video).

Tom Gauld - Revenge of the Librarians

Vasile Decu: Thank you very much for taking the time to do this book talk, but mainly thank you for the book and for the many laughs it offered me. You're my number two Terry Pratchett...

Tom Gauld: I'll take that. That's fine with me. That's very nice to hear, thank you.

I think I'm not the only one. Sometimes I'm fighting depression and your books really, really help.

Oh, that's lovely. Thank you.

Humour is a superpower. I think you would agree that it's your main superpower.

I guess it is. My only superpower, I guess. With making cartoons and writing, the other superpower is patience. Is just taking the time to work long enough on something to make it good.

How is a Tom Gauld story born? To quote one of your cartoons - are you a very focussed writer or a very focussed ornithologist?

Probably more often I'm the ornithologist. The very difficult thing about coming up with the ideas is you can't make them happen through hard work. I can make a good drawing happen through hard work by spending a long time drawing and redrawing. And I can make it look nice by putting hours into cross-hatching it. But there's something about ideas. You have to be ready for them and you have to be ready to see them. But you can't just… ‘arrr’…. make them happen through strength. So some days it's a case of sitting, staring at a blank piece of paper, writing notes and trying to make something happen. And then sometimes it's a case of going for a walk and having a coffee and reading a comic or just relaxing. Unfortunately, I've never found a system that quite works. So the difficult bit is the ideas.

So many of the struggles that the writers in your stories go through are your own.

Exactly. I mean, a lot of the things the writers go through are occasionally my own struggles and more often a worst case version of my struggles. I always feel bad when I draw a sort of heartless, unhelpful editor or a bad publisher, because my publishers are all helpful and lovely and I can't say a bad word about them. But things working isn't funny. Things going wrong is funny. So I imagine these publishers who are obsessed with money or authors who are lazy... And that's, unfortunately, the nature of humour, that it's things going wrong.

You are especially merciless to book critics…

Right. Yeah... Why is that? I suppose I'm often dealing with cliches and playing with them in one way or another. And I suppose, in a way, I'm playing the character of the author who is furious with critics. I can't think of any critics who ever said anything which I found hurtful enough to make me angry. In fact, annoyingly, they often point out something correctly. But I guess that's the cartoon version - the mean critic.

What about journalists? What’s a collective noun for pestering journalists?

For a group of journalists... I don't know, if I was doing it for a cartoon, I guess it would be something like a ‘pub’ full of journalists.

That's a good one.

All my cartoons at The Guardian have to be approved by my editor and she is a journalist. So perhaps, for that reason, I'm maybe more careful, subconsciously, about it, but I guess also as an illustrator, as somebody who works for newspapers and magazines, to a deadline, I do have sympathy for the journalist. Most of my work is done more like a journalist's than like a novelist who spends years at home working to his or her own schedule.

For my readers and watchers and listeners, I'm going to present your book(s) as non-fiction works, because your insights into daily life or the many aspects of this book trade, regarding Revenge of the Librarians, are so spot on that, for me, they are stories, human stories, perfectly told.

Thank you. Yes, it's interesting, I hadn't really thought of the cartoons like that. In a way, I am really a columnist for The Guardian. You know, I have to make this cartoon about literature every week. And you're right, I guess it is based on real life. You could also equally argue it's fiction. I think it's somewhere in between.

I read you mainly through New Scientist. You make science and sciencey stuff sound really funny. For me, one of your masterpieces was that cartoon with the professor…

Right, yes. Well, I guess one of the things I realised with the New Scientist cartoons… which I started doing about ten years later than The Guardian cartoons, and I was a bit worried that, not having had a science education, I wouldn't get the tone right or the details right. But as time has gone on, I've sort of realised that the life of a scientist and the life of an artist are not that dissimilar. You're trying to make something new or make a new discovery. And you often want to be published and perhaps your self-esteem is a little too tied up in your work. There's a lot of things in common. And in the sense of that cartoon, I suppose I was taking that mean side of myself, which would enjoy a bad review of a cartoonist I didn't like, and turning the volume up to 11 and making a mean version and realising that can just as easily be put into the world of science, as into the world of arts and books.

I just realised, while I was speaking the previous question, that I was re-telling you your own story. But this must happen to you often. People come to you and they insist on telling you ‘their’ favourite cartoons and what they think are ‘your’ masterpieces.

Well, that's nice. It's awkward when they tell me one and I realise halfway through that it's by somebody else, that it's not one of mine. Or people start telling them and then they can't remember it. And then I have to finish it. Having to explain your own jokes always feels like you slightly... You know that quote about dissecting a joke… That it’s like dissecting a frog: nobody laughs and in the end the frog's dead, or something like that. I often think that, with my cartoons, when my wife will say ‘What did you do today?’ And I'll say ‘Oh, I drew a cartoon’ and she always goes ‘Tell me about it’. And I'll say ‘No, you need to wait and see it in the paper’. Otherwise, the humour will be gone now; the humour will be gone when you actually see it. So I try and avoid that.

You have to experience it visually. I insist on calling them stories because for me they are stories and I'm not gonna to offend you by telling you that cartoons are very serious and important and established art. I'm doing it for my readers and listeners. It's a niche, a special work of art that indeed can be enjoyed on paper more, I think, than our digital gadgets, in its final form.

Well, yes. I like the fact that these cartoons sort of have three lives. The first life is in the magazines, so in the Guardian, surrounded by reviews of books and in that world, or in New Scientist, with the same thing. And it's almost like they're at home. And I'm writing for a sort of home audience, who I know are interested in books and science and are happy to see these cartoons. Then they get shared on the internet and they go into this crazy whirlpool of a picture of Donald Trump and then a story about, you know, interest rates. And then my cartoon pops up. And then there's something about Lady Gaga. So it's this weird... I feel like they're a bit more out in the world, but I still want the cartoons to work for people who don't know the background or aren't involved in the worlds of books or art. And then I feel like the cartoons sort of come back to this happy retirement, maybe, or just happy family group in the book altogether, where, again, I feel that it's a safer world for them. You know, you don't buy a book of my cartoons... you know, you can flick through it, if you don't like it, you put it down. So I feel like the people reading them then maybe have a warm feeling towards cartoons, in that book selection.

And your collections on paper, your albums, work like a photographer's album, where he or she comes and just brings the best work, on paper, which is a superior medium, I always say. All the work that's related to a subject and, more than a best of, even thematic journeys.

Yeah. I mean, I don't leave that many cartoons out of the books and, obviously, making a cartoon every week... some weeks are better than others. When it's time to make a book, there's always a few I feel they're not as good as the others, and I'll take those away. But the rest of the book is almost like a diary of my last four years, and the latest book of literary cartoons covers the pandemic. So I was wondering, do I leave those in? Do I take them out? If I take them out, maybe it makes it more timeless. But I really liked some of those pandemic cartoons. And I think people enjoy that feeling of seeing those and remembering that weird time in all our lives. So I decided to leave them in and the publisher agreed. And people seem to enjoy those ones still, even though we've hopefully moved on a bit.

I don't think we're going to forget about the pandemic or the fact that we didn't read as much as we should have, during those lockdowns (we both laugh).

I saw that you were born in Scotland. I remember my visit to Scotland, where they needed subtitles for my English and I needed subtitles for them, but the common language was humour. How big of an influence is on your work? This background of yours, this childhood spent there.

I mean, in terms of humour, I think there is a British humour and a Scottish tone of that humour, which is maybe a little drier, maybe a little more deadpan and dark. So I think that was an influence. And I would say a lot of the television which I grew up watching in the 1990s in my, you know, sort of teenage years was an influence. I liked a lot of comedy. And that led to reading those same writers. And I didn't know at the time, because I could only draw and didn't imagine myself ever writing. I was just enjoying it for the fun of it and enjoying making jokes for my friends. I didn't really imagine, until I was almost at the end of art school, that I'd actually be able to do the writing part. I imagined I'd find somebody who was a writer and they would do the writing and I draw the pictures.

I didn't expect that answer. You never know what's in the process of creating. That even you may have doubts. Because I always look at your cartoons and think I'm so jealous of this, that he had this wonderful idea that he then, without any sort of trouble, just put it on paper and draw it perfectly. Another one of your masterpieces, the one where the husband of the novelist comes and says it’s not ok to call the dog not a good boy. And the dog was drawn perfectly, the expression… in just a few lines.

Oh, well, I'm pleased to hear you say that. There's a word humour, in the speech balloon. But the extra, the heart comes from getting that dog's expression right. And with these very simple characters I don't have much to play with, but I spend a lot of time moving an eye up and down and forward and back, just trying to get the expression to work. And I'm very pleased with Marlon, the sad dog's face. And often that's a weird thing to be doing as an adult man, with children coming home and they say, what did you do today at work, daddy? And, you know, half the day was spent drawing and redrawing a dog to make him look sad. But that's what makes or breaks a cartoon often. Is a little, is a tiny little detail. And I enjoy trying to get those right.

Are they your first audience or there are some days when you say ‘you're not my audience, let me talk to somebody else’.

Well, I've sort of realised asking for anyone's opinion isn't very helpful to me. For the short cartoons. It's almost like a scientific experiment where asking someone if it's funny causes them to be unable to find it funny, because you've asked them to think about it in a technical way rather than enjoy it and be surprised. So I don't think... I've realised it's better to just do what I think works and if that means a handful of them every year don't quite work, or are too weird, or people email and say they don't get it, that's a risk I'm willing to take because if I asked for opinions all the time I think I'd never make any work. When I write longer books, the two graphic novels and the kids book, I get feedback because on a longer story I feel I need that. But with the cartoons, I just... Often I'll send it to the editor. And by that point, I can't tell if it's funny or not any more. I've just overthought about it. But I just hope, I think I thought this was funny when I started on it and hopefully it still is. And it's great when she emails back and says she found it funny, because she's really my first audience. So that's always a relief.

Coming back to your humorous superpower. You also, I think, have another one. For me particularly, this was striking. A sort of optimism, a sort of solar view on the world, because you managed to rewrite Hemingway's story, the famous Baby Shoes story. I found it incredible.

That's lovely to hear. Often, one of the ways I trick myself into making these cartoons is to think what is the opposite of a thing. I think of the thing and think ‘what is the exact opposite?’ And with something like that Hemingway story, where... What is it? It's six words long and it's ‘For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn’. And obviously you're supposed to imagine that the baby has died. So it's a tragedy told in six words. And my brain now, when it hears something like that, always tries flipping it round. I was thinking, how could I flip this round so it's the opposite? It's a quite a technical way of going about things. But I realised, oh, that turns out this really nice positive story, which is funny because you know it's the opposite of the negative one, if you know the original story. And then it was just a case of figuring out how to present that on the page. And I wanted always to stick to six words per panel, and then I get caught up in the weeds of the technical stuff, and that usually sees me through until deadline time. So I was pleased when that one turned out and people seemed to like it.

When you have such thunderbolts of ideas, let's say you're in a park with your kids, with your pets, do you write them on paper?

Yes. That's the one thing I always need… is ideas, because twice a week I have these deadlines and if I'm going on holiday I have four deadlines the week before. So it feels like filling a basket with I'm constantly trying to keep the basket topped up. And so I write down any ideas I have. I carry around a little Muji passport notebook that I scribble down. Sometimes I spend a bit more time and do a nice drawing.

Here I was in Riga, on holiday and we went to some little houses and I liked those, so I drew versions of those. And sometimes it's just scribbling down words or sentences. I always have that in my pocket. If I don't have time for that, I have a little folder on my iPhone where I'll type in a note. And if I have a bit more time, I have these bigger sketchbooks that I carry in my rucksack. if I have some time, I'll just sit and fill a page. And if I can, I try and work out the whole idea in these sketchbooks because I prefer working in a sketchbook to on the computer or on paper. It's something nice about working in a sketchbook and the fact that you then all the paths I didn't take are all still in there. And when I'm really stuck, I can go back through and look. And sometimes I do look back through the sketchbooks and find an idea there, which wasn't perfect, but it sort of sets my brain off on new things. So yeah, I'm always hoarding. And even a bad idea can be the start of a cartoon.

I must admit, now that I have the courage, that I prepared this interview last week, reading your book at like 3 a.m. with a notebook, where I put down like ten great questions, but then I forgot where the notebook was because I have the bad habit of using like four, five, six notebooks at a time.

Well, you're doing very well, these are all very good questions. So I guess you've reconstructed them.

Because I remember so many cartoons. The hard part is that I want to ask about tens or hundreds of your cartoons, but I'm just going to my favourites. And, again, the fact that I'm insisting on my favourites is weird, but also… whenever somebody publishes something you kind of lose control over the written, the published work. I have a ‘right’ of calling my favourites and telling ‘you’ about my favourites. How unfair would be this question: what are your masterpieces, in your opinion?

Well, the funny thing is, when I do them... As I was saying, when you've worked on a cartoon, you can't really look at it anymore or understand it. It's sort of this thing. And it takes a little while after I finished it to be able to figure out if they've worked or not. I've done some that I thought were successful and people have been confused by them. And I've handed some in thinking ‘Oh, well, this is a pile of crap, but I'll do better next week’. And people have loved those ones.

I like Samuel Beckett's writing and plays very much and I've done about four cartoons based on his work, and every one of them I've enjoyed doing and I've been happy with the result. And I think he's a very good person to do cartoons about, because there's a very clearly understood idea in the public imagination of what he is, which I can play off and I know his work, so I don't need to do a lot of research. And he's a brilliant, a stark visual writer. So they have a sort of visual element. So I enjoyed, in the latest book, doing one about waiting for Godot to join the Zoom meeting, which felt, I mean, a bit of a cliche, that we were all talking about Zoom meetings, but it was during the pandemic and I was pleased with that one. I also was very happy with the one I did where I made up some fake German words. In English, we're fascinated by the idea of the German compound words and the idea that you can stick three words together and end up with, not a sentence, but one crazy word. And I knew that would be fun, but I didn't want to make something which a German would read and be insulted by my inability to make German words. And I can't speak German. So I used Google Translate and made some really awful words and I sent them to my friend Frank, in Germany, who made them back into imaginary but believable... no, not believable, but they followed the rules of German grammar. So they worked. I enjoyed collaborating with Frank and I was happy with the words in the end.

So those are real words?! I started laughing, because I got the idea. I know about their ability to construct such verbal architecture.

They're possible. I made them up, but... A fun thing about German is that you can make them up. But I did want them to follow the rules because, you know, it's sort of a bit insulting to just make up silly words in someone else's language. I wanted them to work even for somebody who understood the elements. And I was in Germany just a couple of weeks ago reading those cartoons live on stage, and they got a laugh and I didn't have anything thrown at me. So I guess they're acceptable.

Also, in the pandemic, we had our pets for long periods of time. I remember the one with the cat that experiences the pandemic, but in the same happy mood, sleepy, happy mood. Do you have pets?

We have got a cat. But after I wrote a handful of those cartoons about cats... I've always liked cats and I'm a cat person. And my sister in law had a dog who I would walk from time to time. I sort of was inspired by cats and dogs I knew. But it's only more recently we've got one.

I also have cats and I'm a cat person, an all animals person. But I find cats unsuited for non-fiction because when you're deep down in a novel, it's okay that she sleeps next to you and you're both in your worlds. But I read a lot of good non-fiction, science non-fiction, and I want to tell somebody. My mother has dogs and they are wonderful reading companions, because they will listen to current affairs or scientific discoveries with a lot of interest.

There are two cartoons in the book sort of about that, how a dog thinks you're the most wonderful person in the world. The dog loves his owner's novel. And then, in a different cartoon, it's made clear a cat is entirely uninterested in its owner's novel. That's what I quite like about cats. I don't feel guilty when I'm too busy to hang out with my cat.

Because this is a book talk, may I ask you what are your favourite new books that you discovered? Be them photo albums, cartoons, or literature, or non-fiction?

Sure. I'm looking at your books behind you and seeing your science fiction masterworks pile there. And I was just reminding me that a book I enjoyed quite recently was Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. Weirdly, I was asked to do a zoom during the pandemic with some students in America about my book, Mooncop. And I said yes and then I did it. And I said to the professor at the end ‘What's the class?’ And she said ‘Oh, it is Russian literature’. And I said ‘My book Mooncop it's not very Russian’. ‘It goes, Oh, no, it is. It's very, it feels very Russian to us. So we thought it would fit in.’ And I said ‘Oh, well, can you recommend any Russian science fiction?’ And she said ‘You know, this is the book that Stalker was based on, but it's, you know, a completely different thing or a different thing’. So I took her suggestion and read that and enjoyed it.

Trying to think what comics I've read recently... There's an American cartoonist I really like, called Kevin Huizenga, who did a very good book called The River at Night, which I really enjoyed. And he's also made these amazing zines, which are about his sort of process of making the comics. So they're kind of full of his notes and his sketches. I've really been enjoying reading those. And it's fun when you've read a... You know, when you read something or see a movie and you like it so much you end up googling it and reading all about it. This is like an extra good version, because instead of on screen I've got these lovely little zines I can read and kind of carry on thinking about the book.

Cool! Coming back to Roadside Picnic, this summer I went through a phase where there was a mix of depression and anxiety about what's going to happen, here in Romania, next to Ukraine, with the economy, with my own projects. And I was stuck. I couldn't even read, fiction or non-fiction. And then I went to science fiction. Because I said, okay, they say that science fiction is best read when you're 12, which is not really true. Let's see how it sounds now that I'm 40. And Roadside Picnic is a masterpiece of human analysis.

Over the pandemic, I felt a little like that for a while. And the thing I went back to reading was Iain Banks's Culture novels, just because I thought it would be... A bit of utopian science fiction is what I need just now, nothing too depressing. So I enjoyed rereading some of those during the pandemic.

Revenge of the Librarians is a love letter to book lovers in any profession. Readers, publishers, writers, editors. Are you also a book fanatic? I think so, judging by the library behind you.

I mean, I wouldn't say I'm much of a book collector. I guess having lots of cartoonist friends who really are book collectors, I realise I'm on a pretty low level. I used to, because I told myself I'm a cartoonist, it's my job to read cartoons, I sort of gave myself free rein to buy every single comic book I even had a passing interest in. And after a while I realised that was silly and I was ending up with lots of books that I wasn't reading or I didn't really enjoy. So I still buy books that I like and know I'll like, but I use the library a lot more than I used to. I've got a brilliant library, five minutes walk from my house, which has a brilliant comic section which I found out is brilliant because it's curated by my favourite comic shop. And I'm very pleased they've got both of my graphic novels in there, so obviously that wins me over to them. I get a lot of things from the library. And I listen to quite a lot of audiobooks as well, because I need sort of peace and quiet to think of ideas. But when I'm drawing or colouring or cross-hatching, I can have stuff on in the background. I often have an audiobook on, when I'm working. I do love old books and new books and nice books, but buying them and hoarding them is not the obsession which it sort of once was.

Thank you so much for your time, for your answers, especially for your book, and for letting me tell you again what was my favourites.

Oh, thank you very much for telling me about your favourites and for your thoughtful questions of. I've enjoyed talking.