Luck of the draw

From a garden shed at the bottom of his Preston Park home he conjures ogres in “Muddle Earth” and slays egos in the corridors of Whitehall, his intricate drawings layering puns both visual and literal.

He’s best known to young readers for children’s fantasy series The Edge Chronicles, Barnaby Grimes and Ottoline, which he co-writes and illustrates with fellow Brighton author Paul Stewart; while his adult fans enjoy his portrayals of the deputy prime minister as “Little Clegg Riding Hood”, skipping through an electoral reform fairytale and the Prime Minister dressed in a jaunty cricket jumper bearing the legend “Benson & Hedgefunds”.

There are those who find the two strands of his work an unlikely combination but they perhaps underestimate Riddell’s young audience. He firmly believes the qualities adults appreciate in his political cartoons are the same things children enjoy in his books, and employs the same wit and attention to detail whether lampooning the inhabitants of Downing Street or advising on how to spot aliens.

He studied illustration at Brighton University under Raymond Briggs, who expertly demonstrated the unique ways drawing can communicate something as magical as a flying snowman or as terrible as nuclear war.

Briggs’ influence continues to echo through his work, along with that of EH Shepherd and John Tenniel, lauded both as children’s illustrators and as satirists for Punch magazine.

Goth Girl And The Ghost Of A Mouse, his latest book for young adults, is classic Riddell – a “Gothic novel for eight-year-olds” about a lonely girl with ghostly friends.

It was inspired by the true story of Lord Byron and his only daughter, Ada Lovelace, and literary puns abound, from the mouse that advises Ada to “Call me Ishmael”, to the lady novelist Mary Shellfish. Ada’s father, imagined here as Lord Goth, is “mad, bad and dangerous to gnomes”.

“I know,”Riddell grins sheepishly.

But he loves a pun – indeed, he has published whole books of them (see The Da Vinci Cod And Other Illustrations For Unwritten Books).

A splendid cover of black, silver and chocolate-box purple encases Riddell’s distinctive pen-and-ink drawings of ghastly gamekeepers, vampire governesses and singing-ringing trees. Riddell’s somewhat unusual approach involves drawing the “cast” before working them into a story and each character appears perfectly formed on the pages, his talent for expression given form in bespectacled inventors and haughty ladies.

He has always been fascinated by faces.

Riddell’s father was a liberal Anglican vicar and to keep her son quiet during sermons, his mother would give him a pen and paper. He spent his childhood learning his craft from the pews.

“My mother says I always stared at people, that I was one of those slightly creepy silent children. I don’t remember that but I do recall being fascinated by the elderly parishioners, their characters and expressions. I spent a lot of time drawing and it’s left me with a visual memory so I can draw from my head without reference.”

While still an undergraduate at Brighton, he got a lucky break with children’s publisher Walker Books and began producing picture books for them.

On graduating he spent the next five years writing and illustrating for children.

Already, he had begun carving out his own niche. “I always wanted to draw dragons rather than teachers. I didn’t want to do a day trip to the seaside so much as go to Middle Earth and find out what was going on there.”

Working with poets such as Ted Hughes and Roger McGough opened up further possibilities in his work, and when he met Paul Stewart – their children went to the same nursery – he found a kindred spirit.

“We just clicked,”he says sweetly.

“Partly because Paul is incredibly permissive and was happy for me to be drawing as he was writing, to let me dress the set he would inhabit as a writer. It doesn’t often happen that way but we’ve been very lucky.”

The move into political cartoons happened rather by chance in 1998 when The Economist commissioned him to do a series of illustrations about countries joining the European Union. He ended up spending eight years as the magazine’s political cartoonist before moving on to The Independent and The Independent on Sunday. He joined The Observer in 1995 and remains there to this day, amusing young colleagues with his “defiantly non-digital” approach to filing work.

He is one of few illustrators today who continues to work only on paper, although this is less to do with defiance, he says, and more about his lack of ability with computers.

Happily, no editor has ever attempted to “manage him” and he has enjoyed a free rein over the content and subject of his contributions – well, mainly.

“The only time words were exchanged was a few years back when the editorial line at The Observer was to support Blair in the Iraq war and I fundamentally didn’t agree with it. My editor, to his credit, eventually allowed me to follow the anti line, which was a relief. As a cartoonist, you have a certain duty to voice a public mood that I take quite seriously.”

He likes his drawings to “be rude politely. I’m not on the savage cartoonist spectrum. I like the drawings to be very controlled and the element of shock to come when you look at them more closely.”

He is a great admirer of fellow Brighton political cartoonist Steve Bell, who lives up the road from him and who was “a great role model” to Riddell when he started his career. “He’s very clever in the way he draws politicians. They often like to appropriate the image cartoonists create of them and rather love it, which is exactly what you don’t want. But you can’t really enjoy being portrayed as a giant condom, as Steve has done with David Cameron.”

Riddell plans to pay homage to Bell in his next Goth Girl book, immortalising him as “Sir Steven Belljar, eminent and much-loved clog-dancing cartoonist and famous for drawing the Prince Regent as a Cumberland sausage”.

But first he has to launch the current Goth Girl, with the requisite appearances and book signings that go with that. While he is philosophical about criticism from his adult readers and regularly braves the stormy waters of the online comments box, he admits children are more of a terror and that his own three are his sternest critics.

He describes working on an illustration in the studio he shares with his printmaker wife Jo when he was paid a visit by his daughter. “She looked at this intricate picture – quite frankly, a masterpiece – and said, ‘You know Dad, I just don’t know why you bother.’ So if I ever get too confident about my work...”

*Goth Girl And The Ghost Of A Mouse is out now, published by Macmillan and priced £9.99.

* Find out more about Chris Riddell at www.chris riddell.

co.uk.