Interview: Joe Berger

The latest venture from Bristol writer, illustrator, animator and cartoonist Joe Berger follows in the footsteps of Peanuts, Tintin, Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Tom Gates. And, like those firm favourites, Berger’s new series Lyttle Lies will have young readers flocking to follow the adventures of serial liar Sam Lyttle, who makes his debut with The Pudding Problem.

We caught up with Joe to find out the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Who or what was the inspiration for Sam Lyttle?
Sam is loosely based on me as a 10-year-old. I shared Sam’s penchant for telling lies – I was not a malicious liar or a fantasist, but I regularly fibbed to steer the suspicion away from me when problems arose. It took me a long time to realise that lying really gets you into double trouble – it’s always better to own up to a problem you’ve caused, such as (ahem) a deckchair you’ve unthinkingly slashed with a penknife.
The other characters are mostly based on real people I knew back then, and my family. I wanted Sam’s big sister Suzy to be more than just the malign presence older siblings often are in children’s books. Not to say that my sister Hattie and I didn’t fight (a lot of biting went on as I recall) but, deep down, we were there for each other – and we’re very close as adults.

Sam is a character who seems to have plenty of mileage in him – can we look forward to lots of Lyttle Lies sequels?
I really hope so – I’m working on a second book right now. I think the reasons children lie, and the complex situations they get themselves into as a result, are pretty universal. I’m also keen to develop the characters, and to explore Sam’s world more. That said, I don’t really want him to grow up – I love the fact that Charlie Brown and his friends stayed the same age for 50 years, as did Tintin, Asterix et al. One of the lovely tricks literature can play is to suspend time for the reader, and that feels like something to be enjoyed by writer and reader alike.

What did you read as a child?
I was fascinated by Tintin. When bored I would regularly set myself the challenge of reading or re-reading one of his adventures in a single evening – a whole 60 pages! It was like watching a favourite film over and over. As an adult I re-visited some of them, and I love them as much as ever, but I was intrigued by what had held me there as a child, since some of the plots are unfathomably complex. After a while I noticed that the last panel on every page is a cliff-hanger, and makes you want to read on. This is, I think, to do with the fact that the original stories were serialised – it’s a brilliant device for keeping the reader gripped!
Other favourites were the Willard Price ‘adventure’ series, about two teenage zoologists who travelled the world. I loved the Famous Five too, but Price’s Roger and Hal Hunt were exotic and heroic, and appealed to my Americophile nature.

All your work, including The Pudding Problem, is full of humour. How important is that to you?
Humour is hugely important to me, and one of the other things I do is a cartoon in The Guardian each week, which I co-create with Pascal Wyse under the name Berger & Wyse. We’ve been writing it for over 15 years, and over that time it has moved around in the paper, and transformed from a four-panel strip about Hollywood screenwriters to a single panel cartoon about food. Nowadays, we just get to come up with single-panel jokes about anything. It remains one of the most pleasurable and satisfying things I do, though when we can’t find anything to be funny about it can be entirely excruciating and soul-crushing. 
I’m fascinated by how cartoons work – it’s something I like sharing with children when I go to schools to talk about my books. The brilliant thing is that you don’t really need to be able to draw to be funny on paper – it’s all about ideas and timing, a bit like stand-up comedy. The drawing is like the delivery of the joke – and it can be rambling and nuanced, or blunt and throwaway, depending on the type of joke.

Which do you prefer: illustrating your own writing or other writers’ work?
My first forays into children’s literature were the Bridget Fidget picture books, and after those I much preferred illustrating other people’s picture books. I found writing picture books incredibly hard – they’re often about an idea, not a story, and they’re so boiled down, it’s hard to immerse yourself in the writing. I found it impossible to separate the words from the pictures, and would lose confidence in an idea because I couldn’t work out how to visualise it – which inevitably shut down the writing process. 
By contrast, illustrating other people’s picture books is a real pleasure – each spread is a new visual problem to solve, and you get to add your own little narratives, motifs that pop up and even sub-plots. 

And how was the creative process for Lyttle Lies?
I’ve enjoyed it immensely. I wrote it in script/screenplay form, because essentially the words are dialogue and voice-over, and everything else is shown in pictures. So the script went through five or six drafts with my editor at Simon & Schuster, and once it was signed off I got to work on the visuals. Separating those two processes was useful – I took off my writer’s hat and put on my director’s beret, and started thinking visually.
The film-making analogy extends to the idea that the characters are essentially actors to be directed. Designing and developing the visual look of the characters is a bit like casting the movie – you have to draw a character over and over to allow their personality to emerge, to see how expressive they can be, how appealing they are visually to the reader. I read somewhere that Osamu Tezuka, creator of the manga series Astro Boy, views his characters this way, to the extent that the same ‘actor’ will appear in different manga series playing different characters. I love that idea!

In what ways, if any, have digital techniques and innovations changed the way you work?
Digital techniques like Photoshop are a mixed blessing. It’s impossible to imagine not being able to tweak, move and resize artwork at will now, but I do think you lose the spontaneity of a drawing being a drawing – a performance on paper. It’s a bit like the difference between music played live and every track being laid down individually – you sacrifice something to gain more control.
You don’t have to live with accidents – you can erase them and paint them out, and sometimes accidents are happy ones that add to the life and idiosyncrasy of a drawing. But once you’ve gone the digital route, it seems impossible to turn back. Although everything I do starts as drawing on paper, I can’t bring myself to redraw a whole image just because the face went wrong at the last minute – I’ll just redraw the face and patch the two drawings together in Photoshop.
That said, there are lots of artists and illustrators who use the computer to facilitate and who create amazing, beautiful work, so I’m just kvetching. There are pros and cons.

Other than Lyttle Lies, what are you working on at the moment?
I’m still doing the weekly cartoon in The Guardian, and I’m illustrating a picture book called Superhero Mum by Timothy Knapman for the children’s publishers Nosy Crow, a follow-up to Superhero Dad which came out a couple of years ago. I’m also thinking about running workshops on cartoon and comic creation, so I can bang on incessantly to a captive audience. I notice that I’ve used music, film-making and stand-up comedy as analogies just in this interview, so I clearly have some refining to do.

Pudding Problems (Simon and Schuster, £6.99), the first volume in the Lyttle Lies series, is available now. For more info on Joe, visit www.joeberger.co.uk