Scotsman Tom Gauld has built a reputation as a talented cartoonist. His distinctive, concise and minimalist style conveys a sharp and smart sense of humour. Born in Aberdeen, Scotland and based in London, Gauld’s illustrations, which he regularly shares over social networks, cover a variety of themes from literature to science, and are full of pop references.
Gauld has had a regular column in British newspaper The Guardian since 2005, and has also produced editorial cartoons for a number of other international publications, including The Economist, Wired and The New York Times, as well as publishing house Penguin, the UK’s Royal Mail and Google. His artwork has appeared on nine covers of The New Yorker, and since 2014 he has been producing a weekly cartoon for New Scientist magazine, in which he delivers a quirky take on a scientific issue.
sweet kafka
Gauld’s fourth graphic novel, Baking with Kafka, won an Eisner Award for best humour publication in 2018. In the compilation of literary humour cartoons, the cartoonist applies his witty way of seeing the world to a variety of venerated authors and texts.
a walk and some coffee
We caught up with Tom Gauld at a literature festival in Barcelona. He began by explaining how his ideas often come from putting unexpected things together.
Tom Gauld (Scottish accent): I quite often find the best themes for cartoons are things like failure, things going wrong, maybe things that you think are gonna happen and then they don’t. The kind of things that are the enemy of good storytelling, when you’re telling a proper story, but for a short cartoon the humour can come out of a lot less than you need to tell a proper story. All my cartoons started out in my sketchbook. Whenever The Guardian tells me the theme of what they want the cartoon about, instead of rushing to sit at my drawing desk and make a drawing or go to the computer and scan a drawing in, I try and get away from the computer and the drawing desk. And I go for a walk and I drink some coffee in a café, and I sit with my sketchbook and I doodle and I draw, and I try to think around the idea, I try not to rush to come up with a finished idea.
outside the comfort zone
Many of Gauld’s cartoons for The Guardian are focused on literature, but it is when he has to deal with political matters that he feels more benefited by the challenge.
Tom Gauld: Even though I said my heart sinks when I’m asked to make a cartoon about politics, I’ve actually realized that often it spurs me on to go outside my comfort zone and to make something a bit different. And I maybe have to think a bit differently. And when you’ve made, as I have, five hundred cartoons, one of the aims is not to repeat myself. The political ones kind of push me to go somewhere different.
inside your head
Often featuring anthropomorphic objects and animals, Gauld’s cartoons are characterised by an inimitable incisive quality.
Tom Gauld: I think what’s good about having to tell the stories in such a tiny space is they do have to become more iconic and more simple, and more to the point. And I think most of the time that makes them funnier. I like that idea that I’m just giving little nudges and making suggestions, and making a story happen inside somebody’s head. It’s maybe a weird thing to do but I enjoy it.
pictures and words
As cartoons are made up of pictures and words, Gauld reflects on the relationship of these two complementary aspects that create the narrative.
Tom Gauld: Sometimes people ask me questions like, “Are cartoons more about the drawing or the writing?” And the thing I’ve come to realize is, comics and cartoons aren’t about either the drawing or the writing. Really they are about how those two things work together on the page to make this other thing which is comics, and they all have to be read. The drawings aren’t there to be admired. One of the things with comics is, what I’m really doing is using these marks on the page, the drawings and the writing and the panels, to make a story happen in your head. You are the ones who are connecting these stories and turning it into a narrative.
jumping stones
Gauld uses a simple yet inventive metaphor to illustrate how to read a cartoon, comparing it to crossing a stream.
Tom Gauld: I think of it as the story is getting you to cross the stream, and I’m putting in some stones so you can step from stone to stone to get to the other side. And it’s good to get to the other side, but if you move the stones further apart it’s actually more fun to jump from stone to stone.