The Knights of the Magic Flag

Two armies, hundreds of knights, and nearly every one of them waving a striped banner. That is the joke of this page from Martin Handford's Where's Wally? The Fantastic Journey, published in 1989. Wally wears a red and white striped jumper, so putting him in a battlefield of red, white and yellow striped flags is the illustrator's cruellest trick. The scroll in the upper left corner spells out the story: Wally and Wizard Whitebeard arrived at a place more crowded than any before, where two armies with identical magic flags were locked in combat, and Wally had to find the fifth scroll before he could carry on.

Handford drew these scenes by hand in pen and ink with watercolour, and each one could take him up to eight weeks. He had worked as a freelance illustrator specialising in crowds before a publisher suggested he hide a character in one, which turned into a series that sold tens of millions of copies. Look past the flags and you will find small jokes tucked into the chaos: knights whose banners have tangled together, a soldier caught in a tent, a tortoise wandering through the middle of a war. The style sits somewhere between medieval tapestry and comic strip, flat and busy on purpose, with no single focal point to rest on.