Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre have just brought out a brilliant book together - Oliver and the Seawigs. It's a really fun book about adventure and so to celebrate its release, Philip and Sarah have put together a list of their fave fictional journeys! Enjoy! :D
Our Top Ten
Fictional Journeys
Our new book Oliver and the Seawigs is the story of a journey - a very strange
journey, by mobile island, to seas populated by short-sighted mermaids and
mischievous monkeys. And many of our favourite books feature characters going
on journeys and voyages. What better way is there to get away from the rain on
the window and the gloomy knowledge that there is school or work tomorrow than
by travelling in our imaginations to far and fantastical fictional places? Here are a few of the journeys we most
enjoyed, for everyone from toddlers to grown-ups._cover.jpg)
Where the Wild Things Are
by Maurice Sendak
Sarah McIntyre: I love how Max doesn’t just go
to a wild place; the wild place comes to him, as a forest in his bedroom, and
then he sets out. I remember trying to turn my own bedroom into a forest. I
spent ages studying a book about house plants, but I only ever managed to get a
little potted palm thing and a jade plant, and the result was underwhelming.
The Expotition
to the North Pole (in Chapter 8 of Winnie
the Pooh by A A Milne)
Philip Reeve: I love Winnie the Pooh: I
loved it as a child, I loved it as an adult, and I loved reading the stories to
my son (they were always what he wanted to hear if he was ill and I was sitting
up with him at night). This is the one where Christopher Robin leads all his
friends (and all Rabbit’s many friends and relations) off on an ‘expotition’ to
discover the north pole, despite the fact that none of them are sure what an
expotition is - or what the North Pole is either. Funny, and charming, and with
a real sense of how children play (they don’t really go to the North Pole, and
it doesn’t matter a bit).
The Hobbit
and The Lord of the Rings by JRR
Tolkien
PR: I grew up in Brighton, but I
spent a lot of my childhood in Middle Earth, courtesy of the wonderful maps
which folded out of the back of the library’s hardback edition of The Lord of the Rings. Both that book
and The Hobbit are the story of
journeys, and the characters spend most of their time tramping the lanes of the
Shire, the paths of the forests and passes of the Misty Mountains - too much
time, some people think. But I could never get enough of the layers and layers
of detail which build up Tolkien’s fictional world, where beauty or terror
waits around every turning of the road.
SM: I didn’t like these books as a
child, but I read the LOTR trilogy in the year before the films came out and
was totally obsessed with them. I bought the BBC audiobooks on cassette tapes
and played them until they wore out and I had to buy a second set. They made a
great soundtrack for illustrating at my desk, that was at once comforting and
swift-paced enough to drive me on with my work.
The White Darkness
by Geraldine McCaughrean
PR: Sym, a shy teenager obsessed
with the explorer Captain Oates, is lured into her uncle’s mad and dangerous
attempt to cross the Antarctic ice-sheet. Geraldine McCaughrean is my favourite
author, and this is my favourite of her children’s books. It’s aimed at a
slightly older readership than most of her novels: the pace is relentless, the
plot veers in unexpected directions, and there’s a sense of danger and
foreboding to it which adds spice to the beautiful descriptions.
Magnificent!
SM: I love how Sym is
intentionally naïve in the story, she doesn’t want to believe what’s happening
to her is horribly dodgy. In a way, you as the reader get to voyage through her
mind, and you can see before she does that she’s heading into some horrendous
blind alleys.
The Eagle of the Ninth
by Rosemary Sutcliff
PR: When I was a child, walking on
the hills of Sussex, I felt a close imaginative connection with the people who
had walked there before me - Normans and Saxons, Romans and Bronze Age tribes.
That was because I had read Rosemary Sutcliff, who brought those periods to
life in her vivid, beautifully written historical novels. The Eagle of the Ninth was my favourite of them. It’s the story of
crippled former Roman soldier Marcus and the journey he undertakes, with his
freed British slave Esca, beyond Hadrian’s Wall, into the wild lands of the
Picts, to fetch back the Eagle of his father’s lost legion. And it’s also the story of other journeys;
Marcus’s difficult coming to terms with his disability, and the growing
friendship that bridges the divide between Roman and Briton. Like Tolkien,
Rosemary Sutcliff had terrific eye for landscape. She made me realise how big
Britain was, before the coming of trains and cars.
The Twenty-One Balloons
by William Pené du Bois
SM: The hero of this story doesn’t
plan to explore countries, he’s a tired, disgruntled teacher who wants to spend
a year aloft in a hot-air balloon, never coming down. But when he crash-lands
on the island of Krakatoa, he discovers a wildly eccentric society of
inventors, who have constructed a marvelous life for their families based on
colossal wealth from their diamond mines. I loved how they made up their own
rules, basing their names on letters of the alphabet, and how each family ran a
restaurant with the nationality based on their letter: The A family ran an
American restaurant, the Bs, British, Cs, Chinese, etc. The story got me
daydreaming a lot about the kind of society I would want to live in if I could
choose everything and money was no issue.
Gemma Bovary by
Posy Simmonds
SM: This is one of the books that
inspired me to make comics; the story of Gemma Bovery who decides to move to a
country village in France with her husband and set up pastorale lives there.
Posy Simmonds writes and draws such wonderfully observed studies of expat
mannerisms, English romantic ideals and disappointments. I’d recommend this one
for teeangers and adults, but not children.
Master and Commander
by Patrick O’Brian
PR: Like Gemma Bovary, this is not a children’s book, although some teenage
readers might enjoy it. Like The Eagle of
the Ninth, it brings a period of history vividly to life. Set during the
Napoleonic Wars, it begins with the meeting between naval officer Jack Aubrey
and down-at-heel Irish doctor Stephen Maturin - a meeting as important in the
annals of fiction as that between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, and the
beginnings of a friendship which will endure through twenty thrilling, moving,
unexpectedly laugh-out-loud funny novels, and circumnavigate the whole globe.
This first voyage stays close to the shores of Spain, where Captain Aubrey is
busy capturing French and Spanish shipping. There are plenty of battles and
betrayals, but it’s really about the characters, and O’Brian’s glorious,
impressionistic vision of the dawn of the 19th Century.
Pyongyang: a journey in North Korea
by Guy Delisle
SM: Travel comics are such a
wonderful way to share a journey with a reader; so much can go into each image
that would take long paragraphs to describe. And it can be much more subtle;
something might appear in a frame which isn’t pointed out and doesn’t
necessarily have to be noticed, but can be spotted if the reader wants to take
the time; that’s much more like the experience of travelling than having
everything encountered spelled out. I love Guy Delisle’s simple, angular drawings
and getting to see all the unexpected, awkward and bizarre encounters he has on
his trip to Pyongyang to work with an animation studio.
Carnet de Voyage
by Craig Thompson & French Milk
by Lucy Knisley
SM: When I give talks to people
about making travel comics, I like to show them these two travel comic books
together. Both are inspiring, but I think Craig Thompson’s incredibly detailed
drawings and technically proficient brush strokes make a reader think,
‘Amazing, but I could never do that’, while Lucy Knisley’s book makes a reader
think, ‘Amazing, and hey, I could do something like that!’ In a lot of ways,
Knisley’s book – a diary of her trip to Paris with her mother – has a warmth
and intimacy that Thompson’s lacks. Its lack of perfection makes it feel like
something genuinely made on the road, while other things are happening to her.
Whereas reading Thompson’s book, one can’t but help thinking that he did
nothing BUT draw on his trip through France, Barcelona, the Alps and Morocco.
It also made me think about what’s achievable when one travels with other
people and when one travels alone and can stand and draw for two hours on an
obscure street corner. I love both books, and they’re very much what inspired
me to do my own travel comics in China and Alaska.
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Hope you all enjoyed Philip and Sarah's post! And don't forget to follow Philip's Site, follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and YouTube, and check out his books on Goodreads! And follow Sarah's Site and Blog, follow her on Twitter and check out her books on Goodreads!:D
Oh, and check out Oliver and the Seawigs too on Goodreads!And keep up to date with MonthOfGuests on Twitter using #MonthOfGuests2013! And stop by tomorrow for an awesome post by the brilliant Matt Whyman!!
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Philip Reeve was born and raised in Brighton, where he worked in a bookshop for a number of years while also co-writing, producing and directing a number of no-budget theatre projects.Philip then began illustrating and has since provided cartoons for around forty children's books, including the best-selling Horrible Histories, Murderous Maths and Dead Famous series.Philip has been writing stories since he was five, but Mortal Engines was the first to be published.
Illustrator and writer Sarah McIntyre makes picture books and comics with three other artists in an old police station – complete with jail cells! – in Deptford, south London. Her comic Vern and Lettuce appeared weekly in The Guardian and in the DFC; in September 2010, David Fickling launched it as a book as part of the DFC Library. Her picture book with Giles Andreae, Morris the Mankiest Monster, introduced the world to a loveable monster with stomach-turning personal habits. Morris sold out in its first month and has won both the Sheffield and Bishop's Stortford Children's Book Awards, as voted by children. She launched two more picture books in 2010: You Can't Eat a Princess with Scholastic and When Titus Took the Train with Oxford University Press. You Can't Scare a Princess!launches in September this year. She has several more contracts with David Fickling and Scholastic for books that she's written herself, and one that's she's writing with her friend David O'Connell.
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