Eye Magazine

For much of the past decade, illustrator Tom Gauld has been a regular contributor to The Guardian newspaper, starting with its features pages. Gauld’s quirky, visual humour soon attracted a substantial following for all kinds of commissions – short stories, book reviews and a droll comic strip about cavemen.

‘I got him when his bones were still soft,’ said section art director Roger Browning, who later commissioned Gauld to do a regular weekly panel for the letters page of the paper’s Saturday Review section.

‘Sometimes the drawing’s relationship was very tenuous,’ said Browning. ‘We would send him a letter that was exceedingly dull and he would do something wonderful.’

A selection of these letters page panels have just been published as You’re All Just Jealous Of My Jet-Pack, which has page after page of chuckle-out-loud observations about literary lives past, present and future. These include satire on the realities of publishing; previously unexplored links between James Brown and Geoffrey Chaucer; and surreal yet believable reflections on the nature of literacy film adaptations. All are impeccably drawn and lettered in Gauld's deadpan and deceptively simple style.

John L. Walters, editor of Eye, London

First published in Eye no. 85 vol. 22 2013