Interview with Tohby Riddle
Article by Catherine Mah

IN HIS ‘silver screen production’ picture book, The Great Escape from City Zoo, Tohby draws himself with the book’s cast of a tortoise, flamingo, elephant and anteater, as a smiling, youthful man enjoying a dinner out after wrapping up production. This is the man I expect to be meeting as I walk through the halls of The School Magazine building, and I’m not disappointed, although he is more solid and less cartoonish in real life. And older –– I’d expected a Peter Pan, considering he works so much in the children’s genre, but I see a tallish man in his late thirties, with brown hair and a dreamy look in his eyes. He also seems slightly unsure of himself, asking me if he’ll need anything, aside from his brain, and offering me some drinks. He apologises to me for seeming ‘a bit day-dreamy’ and explains that his one year old got up at five that morning, so he’s kind of tired.

After just a few minutes of conversation I can already see the artist behind the sometimes whimsical, always quirky cartoons in the Good Weekend, a man who sees himself not so much as a good drawer as an ‘intelligent image-maker’. He went to a Steiner school where they ‘learn how to express [themselves] in creative ways’ They also learned how to knit. ‘I got stuck on the heel of a sock once … I don’t think I ever finished it. So I knitted reasonably well until I got to heels on socks.’ Going to a Steiner school made him unafraid of having creative ideas and presenting them to the public. ‘I went to art school straight after high school, and I was kind of shaping up to be a painter which I was enjoying … but I think I wanted to get ideas and get them out there. The difference between doing [painting] and say a cartoon or a book is that the book gets reproduced in the thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands and can quite quickly be distributed around the country, so I think that’s what appealed to me.’

He has already made a headway in getting his art recognised around the country, with three of his cartoons featured in the ‘Behind the Lines’ travelling exhibition, along with the likes of Alan Moir, Peter Nicholson and Cathy Wilcox. ‘Behind the Lines’ is a national exhibition of cartoons from 2003 that were outstanding in conveying the political and social issues of the time.

However, in a field where political cartoons abound, Tohby has chosen to divert from the mainstream. When I ask him about this, he shrugs. ‘I don’t feel bound too much by having to make a real joke or be political.’ Admittedly, this is partly because he has to submit his cartoon to the Good Weekend two weeks in advance, but he adds ‘What it does is make you look at what might be topical, and see if there’s a bigger theme in there, that two weeks later might be relevant, and maybe ten years later, because it’s a theme that’s been around since people were around. And I think it’s actually a good discipline because it forces you to think more deeply about what’s going on. I still sometimes do things that may be political, but I think I try and more keep it to a more human level … what it is to be human rather than political because I think political issues are smaller than human issues. To me there seems to be less opportunity for real art in political stuff.’ He confesses that he doesn’t really enjoy reading the newspaper, although he does usually check out his own cartoon, as well as Michael Leunig’s and some others. So how did he feel about the election result? ‘You know, I was sort of surprised, but I’m taking time to work out why people voted the way they did.’

This seems to be the way he works – through observation and assessment. It stood him in good stead when he worked as a mailing clerk for Pan publishing house, now known as Pan McMillan. He got the job there because he was interested in the publishing process, and had ideas to write a picture book. The atmosphere of working there was great, as well as ‘meeting some authors and also seeing unsolicited manuscripts coming in every day. It was my job to open up the parcels and look at them all, and realise that some submissions were better submitted than others, that some people know what they were doing and some don’t, and then starting to think, well that’s going to get rejected, and that’s got a chance, and then a week or two later, I’d be mailing the ones back. So when I had an idea, I thought about all the things I’d seen come and get sent back, and thought, well I think this is stronger than those, it’s worth showing to them. And I had better ideas about presentation too. So it was like a little apprenticeship of some kind. It was what I made of it. I could’ve been in there stamping envelopes but I was soaking up everything because I was interested.’

For someone whose storylines generally involve the surreal or unusual (one of Tohby’s stories involves a bird nesting on a man’s head) he’s suprisingly directed and motivated and this has stood him in good stead. After doing his Art degree, he followed on to do Architecture, and it was then a publisher approached him and contracted him to do another book. By this stage he had already got a children’s book published, called Careful With That Ball, Eugene, which he did ‘simply to see if [he] could’. He decided to take up the contract instead, and defer his architectural degree. Although it was a tough choice for him to turn away from architecture and devote himself fully to writing and drawing, he doesn’t really regret it. ‘I basically got to the situation where I had two other ideas that were contracted, and I didn’t know whether to do those books then and there or go and finish Architecture, and I did the books instead. And I think it took a while to totally decide not to do Architecture, but I realised that once you go into the wider industry of architecture you may not actually be doing much creative work.’

Creative work seems to be what he’s best at, though he’s quite modest about it all, saying that having a one year old is as much of an achievement as having nine books under his belt, and two more still being developed, ‘although it’s hard to consider whether they’re blessings or achievements.’ One book in particular, What’s the Big Idea? he is very proud of. It’s a compilation of some of his prints for the Good Weekend. ‘When I was growing up I used to read a lot of cartoon books, and it never really occurred to me to do one myself, but when it did … seeing that through was quite exciting.

Tohby is Assistant Editor of The School Magazine, a publication for primary school children, and one I remember from my childhood school days. His office area is very quiet, with only a few members of staff, and the whirring hum of photocopiers and computers. Despite this leisurely, peaceful exterior though, Tohby is a busy man. ‘I think in my sort of field, you usually have quite a few things on the boil to keep the income going, to keep yourself afloat. You sort of freelance, so you do a lot of things. [Also], after I finish here, by the time I get home, it’s bathing and feeding time, before I do anything else.’

I comment that he seems to prefer working with children’s fiction. He thinks about it for a bit. ‘I think I was really mainly interested in the medium which was words and pictures. There’s a place for humour and nonsense in children’s literature, so there’s a lot I like about it, but I wouldn’t say I definitely prefer it over adult stuff because I enjoy adult literature, and wouldn’t rule out writing stuff for adults.’ He points out that his cartoons for the Good Weekend have more of an adult following, although ‘there’s no really strict line I draw in the sand.’ Because the themes of his cartoons are universal and timeless, they’re not aimed at any particular age group. Likewise his picture books; one of his most popular ones, The Great Escape from City Zoo which was shortlisted for a book prize by the Children’s Book Council of Australia, contains many allusions to contemporary artworks and icons. My personal favourite is one of a taxidermist’s with the slogan ‘You snuff ‘em, we stuff ‘em!’ It speaks well for Tohby’s popularity that adults give other adults his picture books as gifts.

Something I’ve noticed about Tohby’s artwork is that it features a lot of animals. ‘They’re like innocent little beings that roam around the world and things happen to them. A bit like humans sometimes. And that’s why I think people can relate to them.’ The cartoons he draws contain a subtle wit and humour, which is what makes them so appealing; they’re also slightly bizarre like his stories. He looks a bit surprised, or confused when I tell him that. ‘It just depends on your definition of what’s bizarre. I mean, nothing is that bizarre, really. That’s what you can do in a book or in a picture … anything can happen in there, if you can make the logic work somehow.’

When I ask him what he’s working on at the moment, he’s a trifle reticent. ‘It’s hard to say just yet, I can’t quite tell what it’s about … it’s more or less an adults novel, maybe young adults. We’ll see I guess.’

Like a true gentleman, he gets up and opens the door for me, and asks me if I’ll have any problems getting home. Tohby comes across as a man with an obvious interest in the mechanics of everyday life, who can make the mundane into a fascinating sketch. An observant man, who nonetheless manages to retain a sense of wonder. Despite his initial bemused and slightly shy demeanor, he becomes very animated when talking about things he’s passionate about; for instance, his desire to own a donkey. ‘I can’t really get one at the moment because we live in an apartment. But I came across a few donkeys a couple of years ago, actually last year, in New Zealand, and they were great … They’re funny. They seem pretty intelligent.’ He goes on to tell me about his encounter with a donkey. ‘I was actually being hassled by a deer because I had a tin of feed in this sort of open park where there are big animals, and the donkey was watching me, and I think he thought it was pretty funny. He’d had a sort of smile on his face. Apparently they can be quite patient and intelligent, and they just watch things, work out what’s going on. So yeah, maybe one day.’

Courtesy Catherine Mah © 2004

References
1) Interview with Tohby Riddle (conducted 12/10/04)
2) website: www.tohby.com (last accessed 17/10/04)
3) The Great Escape from City Zoo by Tohby Riddle © 1997. Published by HarperCollins