马丁·韩福特

马丁·汉福德（英语：Martin Handford，1956年9月27日—）是英国著名绘本作家。

生平

于1980年代中期创作《威利在哪里？》而成名。马丁毕业典于英国肯特艺术设计学校，即现今的创作艺术大学。

Martin Handford (born 27 September 1956) is an English children's author and illustrator from London who gained worldwide fame in the mid-1980s for his Where's Wally? book series (known as Where's Waldo? in North America).

Early life

Born in London, Handford was a solitary child to divorced parents. He began drawing when he was about 5 years old, using stick figures on paper to recreate crowded battle scenes that he witnessed in films such as The Alamo (1960), or drawings by Cornelius DeWitt in The Golden History of the World, Handford's favorite book. He stated, "I have always done pictures of crowds... miniature pictures with lots of activity, usually with a sense of humor." He also drew inspiration from his toy soldiers, which he frequently arranged. After school, when most other children went outside to play games, Handford drew pictures of people.

Career

Handford attended art college for three years at the University for the Creative Arts (formerly known as Kent Institute of Art and Design) in Maidstone, Kent. Before his illustration career, Handford worked as an insurance agent for three years. He also took on freelance illustration work and specialised in crowd scenes, working with clients in media and advertising. He created the album cover for The Vapors' 1981 album Magnets. The cover features an assassination scene which forms the shape of an eye.

In 1986, an art director from Walker Books commissioned Handford to draw a crowd containing a hidden character with peculiar features to make readers look more closely, an idea similar to Busy Places by Philippe Dupasquier. Handford created a two-page spread that introduced "Wally", a world traveller and time travel aficionado dressed in a red and white striped shirt. Handford said in 1993 that there was "no other significance in the clothing" besides being distinctive. Wally is joined on most of his travels by his friend Wenda, who wears clothes with the same colours as Wally's, an evil character named Odlaw (Waldo spelled backwards) who dresses in yellow and black, and a dog named Woof.

Handford published his first Where's Wally? book in 1987 and earned a reputation for being a methodical and diligent worker. Each two-page sketch drawing contains hundreds or even thousands of figures and takes him as much as eight weeks to complete. The drawings are drawn to the same scale as in the books and each two-page spread usually contains at least 300 to 500 figures, with Wally often being the last character drawn into the crowd.

Handford initially felt that Wally was a trainspotter, and said "When I originally thought of the character who was lost in all these scenes, I just imagined that the reason why he was lost was because he was slightly idiotic and didn't know where he was going." In 1997, Handford expressed that Wally had changed to appear "less nerdy", and emphasized that Wally is "not idiotic. He is a cool guy. He knows where he's going. He's very open-minded. He's kind." Handford said he was hopeful that Wally was "suitably different" from other characters in children's media, stating "I think he's less violent and less macho".

Where's Wally? success

Handford produced a total of seven "classic" Where's Wally? books, and the Wally character branched out into notebooks, pillows, posters, video games and food products including "Waldo-O's" pasta and tomato sauce. Wally was the subject of a syndicated comic strip as well as two animated TV series: one in 1991 and another in 2019, the latter being retitled to Where's Waldo to cater to the American audience. Handford became a minor celebrity with the success of Where's Wally?. The Where's Wally? trademark has sold in at least 28 different countries.