I haven’t chosen Carl Giles because he illustrated children’s books. He didn’t. Carl Giles was actually a political cartoonist in the UK’s Daily Express newspaper from the early 1940s until 1989.
So why am I including him? Well, Giles’ popularity became so great that from 1946 onwards, Giles cartoons for the previous year were published in an annual. I first encountered them as a kid, when I read one in a doctor’s waiting room. I didn’t get a lot of the jokes, not knowing the context. However I was captivated by the images. In many of his cartoons, Giles used his fictionalised ‘Giles’ family, and the grandmother, “Grandma” became something of a national institution. So much so that there is actually a statue of Grandma in Ipswich, Giles’ adopted hometown. In many English households the arrival of the Giles annual became something of a Christmas institution. I learned a lot about England in the late 50s and early 60s, before I was born, from reading old Giles annuals.
I had to copy Grandma, of course, but a typical Giles cartoon has much more to it than one or two characters. There’s often a whole other level of humour going on in the background, and they’re the sort of thing you can look at two or three times, and still see something new in them.
