Tom Gauld interviewed in The Comics Journal

Tom Gauld’s transformation of the humble stick figure is perhaps the most impressive sleight of hand you will witness. Gauld’s iconic style, visual clarity, and playful incongruities lend his narratives with a depth of insight and feeling that perhaps unanticipated from a simple approach. This approach, however, has become a signature of Gauld’s illustration work (The New Yorker), strip work (The Guardian and New Scientist Magazine), and original graphic novels (Goliath and Mooncop). Gauld seems to delight in overturning generic tropes, character archetypes, and reader expectations in his work. His diagrammatic cartooning adds layers of meaning to even single-panel narratives and injects the ordinary with a bit of the fantastic. Charming and unassuming, there’s something for every reader to admire in Gauld’s work. Gauld takes a moment away from the tight deadlines of weekly comic strip creation to talk about his artistic development, his home library, and his latest book with Drawn and Quarterly, Department of Mind-Blowing Theories. Gauld also reflects on comics as artistic objects, how different formats impact visual storytelling, how political themes infiltrate his work or don’t, and the reader’s role in creating meaning. The following interview was conducted in July 2020.

This interview has been edited and condensed from its original form for the purposes of clarity. 

Irene Velentzas: The first thing I’m curious to know is: What were you like as a child?

Tom Gauld: I think I was a pretty normal kid in lots of ways. I lived in the countryside, I liked playing outside in the woods with my friends, but I did love to draw. I just spent hours filling notebooks and papers. I make comics now and that came definitely from drawing rather than writing. I made stories, but for me, it was always more about drawing the pictures. I was quiet, but not exceptionally so, and I liked to read, but probably not as much as you’d imagine from somebody who now makes a living doing a lot of literary cartoons.

I was definitely picturing somebody who would doodle a lot of monsters in battle as a child.

Yes. I was lucky when I was in primary school I used to draw in the margins of all my books, and my teacher said to me one day: ‘I’ll give you an extra book and you can just draw in that when you’re finished your work, and as long as you’re finishing the work, you can fill that with as many doodles as you want.’ From about the age of seven or eight, I had a sketch book, which I was allowed to use. Because I was generally keeping up with the work, it didn’t seem to matter that I was doodling at the same time, in fact sometimes it probably helped my thinking process. It was very kind of [my teacher] Mrs. Horrocks to give me that when I was young.

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Read the rest of the interview at the link above