Super, happy, magic: an interview with Matty Long

‘Frogs are funny looking. They’re just naturally funny characters,’ says Matty Long, creator of the Super Happy Magic Forest picture and chapter books (now a major BBC animation series). And, looking at his latest creation, Croaky Hopper, it’s hard to disagree.

Croaky is a very enthusiastic and rather naïve young frog who yearns for adventure, just like his TV hero, the Indiana Jones-esque Tennessee Toad. When we first meet Croaky in Search for the Sasquatch, the first in a six-book series of early-reader chapter books, Croaky fears he is in for adventuring disappointment on joining the underwhelming Woggle Scouts. That’s until he discovers that bumbling puffin leader Winston has a secret past – as an explorer! Together with committed Woggle Scout Sheena, a mouse with more than enough smarts for all of them, the trio embark on a search for the mythical ‘Bigfoot’ in Crystal Creek national park. In the second book, Quest for the Legendary Berry, Croaky and the Woggle Scouts head into remote jungle to find a mysterious fruit, facing off Giganto-bugs along the way.

Croaky has some natural froggy adventuring advantages – ‘the fact that he can use his long tongue makes him a readymade adventurer. He can climb walls and use his tongue to get out of certain situations. He could use it as a lasso…’ Long points out. But he also compares the trio to Grandpa and Bart from the Simpsons in their dynamic of hilarious haplessness, while Sheena takes the Lisa role, offering sensible suggestions, along with wonderfully deadpan asides and eye rolls, to get them safely back on track.

‘I just love group dynamics when it comes to making books,’ says Long. “Every book I’ve made has, at the very least, a pairing so the characters can bounce off each other. That’s how you create tension, contrast and humour. If one character is responding to something in a certain way and it’s completely alien to the other character, you can lean into the tension or the humour with that.’

And the Croaky books are indeed brilliantly, often surreally funny. Long’s bold drawings with their thick outlines, bright pops of colour, and characters with expressive big googly eyes and speech bubbles pair beautifully with the wry humour and pace of the stories to keep young readers page turning.

It makes it all the more surprising that Long does not consider himself to be a writer.  ‘I’m an accidental author,’ he says. ‘I don’t come from a writing background. I come from an illustration background. That’s the thing that excites me. I never intended to be an author at all.’

So he brings his experience with the cadence and rhythm of picture books – the ultimate challenge for concise storytelling – to make his chapter books feel pacey, paying attention to page turns and reveals, and making sure the narrative text leads into the speech bubbles.

But for Long, it all starts with the doodling. ‘I like coming up with ideas for stories. That’s always fun – the genesis of stories, drawing, doodling when everything is potential.’

In many ways, it’s always been about the doodling for Long. At school, he ‘doodled a lot in class’ but lost interest in art at GCSE level, with its demand for broader but shallower skills. However, he went on to do A level art at college and ‘my art teacher really cottoned on to the fact that I liked working in pen and ink, doing really detailed lines, crosshatching, all that sort of stuff.’ With his passion for drawing reignited, an illustration degree seemed like the natural next step. He followed it up with the Cambridge School of Art MA in Children’s Book Illustration as a path that would enable him to stay in control of his own illustrating destiny, given that illustrating other people’s work held no great appeal.

However, frustratingly, his career didn’t take off as quickly as some of his peers on the course. He was losing belief in his ability to ever make a living as a picture book creator when a chance encounter changed everything. Cycling home one evening from a depressing job in a call centre in Cambridge, he caught sight of Pam Smy, an illustrator who had taught on his MA.

‘We had a chat and I think she could tell I was pretty down on myself and how things had panned out post-MA,’ he explained. ‘I was probably feeling sorry for myself. I always believed in what I did and, at that moment, it felt like others didn’t.’

As a result of that meeting he got a commission to illustrate a set of massive hoardings leading to the children’s section of Heffers bookshop in Cambridge. Pam’s belief in him and doing the work itself – ‘I created this big space piece with lots of random space stuff, robots, creatures!’ –  kickstarted him to get back to his drawing board and make a picture book to go the Bologna Book Fair. It didn’t get published but the positive reaction to it encouraged him to follow his instincts in the work he was creating: ‘I started to use a bit more humour, making more the book I wanted to make rather than trying to pander to what I thought the industry wanted,’ he explained.

It paid off. The Super Happy Magic Forest picture books were picked up by OUP, the chapter books followed at his editor’s suggestion and things turned around. With the Super Happy Magic Forest picture book being optioned by a TV production company in 2016, Long has also been busy working on getting the animation of the comedy quest adventure series out. Pace picked up in the last couple of years when the series was commissioned and Long has had extensive creative input, to ensure that the world stays true to his original vision, from vetting scripts to approving the voice actors. The first 26 of the 52 11-minute episodes, in which the five heroes do plenty of questing, frolicking and picnicking, were released this month.

It’s an exciting time but, as well as working through the scripts for another 26 episodes of the animation, his attention is also taken up by Croaky: he’s just sent off Croaky: Caverns of the Gemosaurus and is now playing around with ideas for the fourth in the series.

‘I do feel like now, especially with a TV show, I’ll probably look back on this as being the best time – and now that I’m living it, I do think a lot about the people that have got me to this stage and just how grateful I am to them,’ says Long.

Michelle Pauli is a freelance writer and editor specialising in books and education. She created and edited the Guardian children’s books site.

The Super Happy Magic Forest books are published by Oxford Children’s Books.