Page 98 - Gullivers

that the Lilliputians have had a religious-like civil war about eggs, Riddell
uses a riot of comic/iconic images of birds and eggs as a signature to that entire adventure. Even the ships have bird figures for their mastheads. In addition Gulliver’s blue Lilliputian coverlet/back-pack, decorated with vivid white
and yellow eggs, accompanies him on his final journey in the land of the Houyhnhnms, creating visual continuity from the beginning to the end of the book. Riddell sometimes takes his cue from Swist’s original rather than from Jenkins’ retelling, as for example when he depicts the Brobdingnagians as wearing stereotypical oriental costume and using oriental utensils, obviously inspired by Swist’s text where we are told their clothes ‘resemble the Persian and Chinese’. Riddell, in an interview with Elspeth Hyams in 2005, states that there was no authorial brief, ‘I am reacting to Martin’s text’. Given that freedom, Riddell says ‘The result was a big picture book, rather than a (possibly intimidating) “great
big book” ’. He did not want ‘a reverential retelling’, principally text and then an illustration, ‘or a grand coffee-table book’, but ‘something very accessible, which invites you to be amused and endlessly entertained’. He also says that he was aiming at ‘ that picture-book sensibility, so kids pick it up and look at the pictures... not necessarily sequentially... Each spread is a little episode on its own that can be read almost on its own. It dœsn’t need to match the order of the book, you can dip in... I kept the colours very bright and the pace friendly so that you are not overwhelmed by detail.’ His imagined reader of his pictures is somewhat younger than the target age. ‘I was thinking of a child of six or seven picking
it up and flicking through’. He also says he saw Gulliver’s Travels as the ultimate shaggy dog story. He adds, significantly, that though Gulliver is likeable in
some ways, ‘he is also full of himself... by the time he is stranded with the horses his crew have got fed up with him. He’s completely insufferable. I dressed him
up in finery and lace and a frock-coat, to suggest he was pompous.’ That latter comment is revealing because there is little in Swist’s or Jenkins’ texts to suggest that Gulliver has become more pompous.
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