The Land of Waldos

Hundreds of identical figures in red and white stripes swarm across this page, and every single one of them looks like the hero of the book. This is the closing scene of Martin Handford's Where's Waldo? The Fantastic Journey from 1989, known in Britain as Where's Wally?. The scroll in the upper left explains the joke: after collecting twelve scrolls on his travels, Waldo discovers he was never the only one. A whole land of Waldos was waiting, along with loyal followers who set off to help him find his missing shoe. The reader's task flips from finding one man in a crowd to finding the one man in a crowd of himself, picked out by a single detail he has lost.

Handford drew these scenes by hand in pen and ink with watercolour, and a single spread could take him around eight weeks. He had always liked drawing crowds; it was his editor who suggested planting a character inside them to give readers something to hunt for. Look for the small breaks in the pattern here: a green dragon being hauled along at the left, a man in yellow and black stripes near the centre who is Odlaw, Waldo's sticky-fingered opposite, and a white-bearded wizard tucked into the throng. The style owes something to old illustrated crowd prints and comic panels, packed edge to edge with tiny jokes rather than any single focal point. It works less like a picture you take in at once and more like a game you lose half an hour to.