Once Upon a Saturday Morning

Five hundred years ago, on a Saturday morning, a market town wakes up and absolutely nothing goes to plan. Carts tip over, dogs bolt through the crowd, knights ride past thatched roofs, and hundreds of tiny people bump into each other under striped awnings. Somewhere in that scramble stands a man in a red and white striped jumper and bobble hat. The signboard in the corner, written here in Portuguese, sets the scene for readers before they begin the hunt.

This comes from the Where's Wally books by British illustrator Martin Handford, who has been drawing crowds since he was a boy filling pages with armies and gatherings. When a publisher asked him in the 1980s to invent a character who could lead readers through those crowds, Wally was born, and the first book appeared in 1987. Handford draws every scene by hand in pen and ink with watercolour, and a single picture can take him around two months. He has said he never plans exactly where Wally will end up, tucking him in once the crowd is finished.

The approach owes something to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose sixteenth century village scenes packed dozens of separate little stories into one frame. Handford does the same thing, just with jokes. Skip the search for a second and follow the edges instead: a man carrying a ladder that keeps knocking hats off, a stall collapsing under its own goods, a queue that has clearly gone wrong. The fun is less in finding Wally than in all the small disasters happening while you look.