A Q&A interview with Mini Grey
Prize-winning illustrator Mini Grey is the illustrator of a new version of Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man, The Coming of the Iron Man, specially abridged for younger readers. She answers our questions about illustrating the story in this special Q&A.
What excited you about the opportunity to illustrate this abridged version of The Iron Man?
The Iron Man was originally published in 1968, but it actually feels to me like it was written earlier. There are details that are very much of their time – like Hogarth trying to catch a fox with a dead chicken. The story is very mysterious at heart – we really have no idea what the Iron Man really is, and whether somebody made him. Or how the iron he eats powers him. Or why on earth he just falls off a cliff, puts himself back together and then just walks into the sea. He seems to not be either good or bad, he just is. So that unresolvability, that ambiguity, I like – it’s something to mull about.
For me, Chris Mould’s book of The Iron Man is the definitive one. When I knew I was going to illustrate The Iron Man as a picture book, I had to hide away my copy of Chris’s version and not look at it otherwise I knew I’d want to give up!
How did you approach creating your version of the Iron Man himself – was there a particular starting point or inspiration for your representation?
Before I started illustrating the story, I was on a flight to Costa Rica and one in-flight film was The Iron Giant, an animation by Brad Bird. It’s a really fantastic reinterpretation of the story, I think, and also really touching in the growing friendship between the Giant and Hogarth – I liked the way Hogarth was teaching the giant to be gentle and a protector.
One initial challenge was to work out how my Iron Man would be constructed. My Iron Man is a sort of steampunk mashup of washing machine and steam engine. He has a furnace in his chest. I wanted him to be simultaneously metally and rusty – but hopefully not too human (he doesn’t have a nose!), more like a friendly appliance.
Was your ability to weld helpful when it came to creating this Iron Man?
Ha! My ability to weld is quite rusty – I haven’t done any for at least 20 years. I did want to take the Iron Man’s metal texture on a journey from iron to rusty to blue so I’m sure the experience of melting and fusing metal and my rusting welding projects lying in the garden all played a part.
The story is as much about nature as it is about an iron man, how did you reflect that in your illustrations? Can you tell us about your decision to include a fox as an observer?
Leah Thaxton, my editor at Faber, initially gave me several volumes of Ted Hughes’ nature poetry (which are also published by Faber). It felt like a very British landscape: many of Ted Hughes’ animals I see when I run down the river in Oxford: herons, cuckoos, kingfishers, swifts and swallows. In the poem The Thought Fox a writer is visited by a fox in the snow who somehow leaps a poem to life on the page, like an avatar of creativity. So The Thought Fox inspired the recurring fox I hid in the pictures.
How important was perspective and viewpoints in the illustrations, especially when it comes to creating a sense of the size and nature of the Iron Man?
I knew that the illustrations were going to need to be very landscapey – which I find much harder than just say figures on a flat background. In my initial sketches I tried to imagine the Iron Man from every possible viewpoint – bird’s eye, worm’s eye, seagull’s eye. But also – I had to decide exactly how big he was. There are clues in the text, like feet the size of single beds…I made a height chart and decided that the Iron Man was taller than a house, but smaller than a largish tree.
The end papers are particularly striking and atmospheric – can you tell us how they evolved?
The Coming of the Iron Man was originally intended to be a 32 page picture book. There was a point when I was making the artwork that Leah my editor decided that the story needed more space, so we enlarged it to 48 pages. And that’s an incredible feeling – like taking off a constricting corset and suddenly having a luxurious quantity of spare space, which I think this story about a giant really needed. So we put in the endpapers, and extra scenes – of the Iron Man walking into the sea, and the picture of Hogarth reading to the Iron Man at the end. With the endpapers, I wanted a feeling of dusk, and animals fleeing, and something big arriving. And then at the end, the same dusk landscape and animals, but the big thing has passed through. We made the endpapers as dark and scuzzy as possible, just as much as possible dusky atmosphere. And hopefully animals to spot too.
Is there a particular page or detail you’d like to describe for us?
Drawing the Iron Man’s hand holding an eye and wandering the beach looking for the rest of his bodyparts was maybe the hardest picture. I wondered if this was the image that sparked Ted Hughes’s story: the picture of a metal giant toppling off a cliff, shattering to pieces, and then the pieces still alive, putting themselves together. I got really stuck on making this image, I remade it several times. And I’m still not happy with it. But I like the crabs.
The Coming of the Iron Man is published by Faber, 978-0571382736, £7.99 pbk.
