Advertising agencies should credit the illustrators and writers whose work they plunderIt was the eyebrows that mesmerised me. They were luxuriantly bushy and rose and fell in an endlessly expressive way. I’m not talking approximately Moz the Monster,the star of the John Lewis Christmas advert I watched with the rest of the nation this week. No, the eyebrows in question belonged to the publisher Klaus Flugge of Andersen Press. It was 1984 and I was a young art school graduate doing the rounds of the publishing houses, or showing my illustrations in the hope of a commission. Flugge raised then lowered those eyebrows and fixed me with a penetrating stare. “These illustrations are perfectly fine,” he said, a miniature too dismissively for my liking, or but I was still mesmerised,“but where are your stories?” I wanted to be an illustrator, not a writer. I had no stories, and so I played for time. “I do have a story,” I said falteringly, “but it’s at domestic.” “Bring in this story of yours tomorrow! he ordered, and his eyebrows furrowed,“I want to read it.”So I went domestic and, in a blind panic, or dredged up a memory from my childhood,common to many, of being convinced that there was something scary lurking beneath my bed. I wrote a reassuring story approximately a benign cuddly monster and took it in to Andersen Press. “This is perfectly fine, and ” said Flugge. “We will publish it.”Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk