Railway Ribaldry

"Picture books for adults, I suppose. Well none of these is a graphic novel. You could say they’re all comics. That’s what I’d say, but in fact only Chris Ware’s one is a comic in the ordinary sense. Graphic novels can be great, of course, but I prefer something a bit more unusual most of the time. The titles I’ve chosen are the types of books that interest me: cartoon books, picture books for adults. People tend to think that when you’re an adult you don’t need pictures any more to enjoy a story. But it’s not as though when we’re adults we give up TV and only listen to radio. The relationship between words and pictures is an interesting relationship. A bad picture book obviously just repeats the pictures in words – ‘This is an apple’ – but a good one uses each medium to complement or sophisticate the other: ‘This is not a pipe’. And the more you read picture books, the better you get at reading them, the more you can get out of them. Interestingly, when I’m tired I tend only to read the words in a comic, instead of taking the time to slow down and look at the pictures. The Heath Robinson railway book. I chose these titles chronologically, according to when I read them in my life. It wasn’t a book when I first saw it, it was a calendar my dad had, who was an architect. It’d been given to him by some kind of building supplier and I was fascinated by it. I was always fascinated by my dad and his drawings for work – buildings, technical drawings. I loved all the fancy drawing tools he had that I didn’t have: Rotring pens and tracing paper and a photocopier and razor blades. I always wanted him to bring me home tracing paper so I could copy pictures out of comics, and he would refuse and insist on my drawing them by eye. But there’s a magic to tracing paper. Yes. They’re cartoons, but they’re also diagrams of machines. They’re funny, but they always work. You can see instantly what the machine does. They look overly complex, and they are, but there’s no decoration in them. It’s all storytelling. Yes. It’s usually a joke, but even if it’s not it’s mostly about communicating one idea, and when you get that idea it makes you feel good. In my cartoon in The Guardian that’s always what I aim to do – to give some joy of understanding. Sometimes because it’s funny and sometimes just because it’s interesting. This book had a huge influence on me."