Back when Mini Grey was a teacher, a boy of five or six came up to her in the playground to show her his Action Man figure. It was wearing a pair of green knitted trousers and a green knitted jacket with buttons.
‘It was meant to be Action Mannish, being a jungle green colour, but, being knitted, it was like a romper suit,’ she explains.
‘So I was hoping all day that no one was going to laugh at that Action Man, because it was going to be an ordeal for him.’ Years later that incident led, of course, to Traction Man is Here. Grey reaches into her bag, pulls something out and puts it on the table. It’s an Action Man figure wearing green knitted trousers. I assume it’s something a fan made for her after reading Traction Man. It isn’t.
‘When my son Herb was born, I thought I’d try to get a nanny for him. She had a son, so I gave him a copy of Traction Man and told him the story of where it came from.
They went to a car boot sale and bought a stack of Action Man stuff, took it home, turned it upside down and right in the middle was this guy. We just thought, how many Action Men would have had a pair of green knitted trousers? He’s quite vintage. He could be 10 years old. Unless there was a rage going on 10 years ago, this must be the one the boy was holding in the playground.’
'We just thought, how many Action Men would have had a pair of green knitted trousers?'
The amazing coincidence seems to suggest that Grey and Traction Man are a natural pairing, and she does find that writing the stories has been effortless compared to her other work.
‘With Traction Man Meets Turbodog I thought the worst thing that could happen is that Scrubbing Brush has been thrown away. It’s a bit like Orpheus in the underworld, going to the land of the dead. And what could you replace him with? A robotic dog would be the perfect sidekick. And what’s the worst robotic dog?
'So it came from that, and then I more or less just wrote the story. I got into the mode of writing in the Traction Man voice, and you find before you know it you’ve written it and you can start to play with where the pictures are going to go. It’s nice when you write a story that you know is going to work.’
The centre double page spread depicts Scrubbing Brush surrounded by threatening pizza slices and hissing pasta in the dark and frightening world of the bin. Although the scene has its comic side, there is, nevertheless, a menacing air about it. In The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon, and even the gentler Biscuit Bear, apparently innocuous objects become threatening.
Grey’s interest in illustrating danger stems from a childhood love of horror. ‘I used to watch Hammer Horror movies on a Friday night. My idea of an amazing day out would be to go to Madame Tussaud’s. It would be terrifying, but utterly fascinating at the same time. So you’re drawn to the scary thing, but it’s exciting as well as terrifying. I also think that the danger presents a sort of excitement.
'If you see the scale of the trouble that’s about to happen to you, it’s five times as exciting to try to find a way out of it. So there’s the excitement of watching the danger unfold, but it’s in a picture book, so hopefully it’s a safe place to be dangerous.’
With Scrubbing Brush off the scene, Action Man must make do with battery-operated Turbodog, who is unable to negotiate difficult terrain and has a restricted vocabulary. That the book portrays imaginative play as superior to the more limited world of electronic toys is unsurprising given Grey’s fondness for enlisting ordinary household items as characters in her books.
'If you play computer games, a lot of the imagining has been done for you. But when you’re the animator, you’re the one that makes it up'
‘Being able to imagine stuff is what I remember doing as a kid all the time: playing games and imagining things. I think if you watch telly, a lot of the imagining is done for you; that’s why it’s so relaxing to watch telly. And if you play computer games, a lot of the imagining has been done for you. But when you’re the animator, you’re the one that makes it up, your imagination is working full tilt. And Turbodog’s problem is that he only does one thing. He doesn’t do anything else very well at all. He’s not open-ended.’
‘The best toys are the open-ended things. To be open-ended it needs to have a combination of gentle and exciting. It’s not that male is exciting and female is domestic; everyone is a combination of both. Traction Man never has a weapon. He’s quite low-tech. He’s never anything but gentlemanly, and no one really gets hurt. He’s always polite. The dollies are naked, and he blushes slightly, but they are all still “ladies”’.
Like other superheroes, Traction Man ostensibly has his origins in a comic book. The endpapers of Traction Man Meets Turbodog depict the cover of Traction Man magazine, coupons for a toy Turbodog and a scene in which Scrubbing Brush makes short work of the ineffectual canine.
Yet, surprisingly, Grey was never interested in comic books as a child, and it was only later that she took to Asterix and Tintin. ‘I always found there was too much going on on the page. I just thought it was too much to take in at one go. Also, you can’t read a comic book aloud very easily.
'Posy Simmonds’ you can read one to one, but reading to a group it’s tricky. I tried to never have more panels than you could take in in one big glance, so hopefully you know where to look first.’
Grey works with a computer to help her overcome technical difficulties, but, in keeping with the book’s pro-low-tech stance, Traction Man Meets Turbodog was made using mostly traditional methods.
‘A lot of it is very straight painting. I paint the light and shade in Quink ink and bleach first. You end up with a black and white thing, and then put the colour on afterwards, and then the lines go on last. I like doing lines last. It’s a bit hair-raising, because if you mess up the lines then all that painting gets ruined.
'But I kind of think at that point I don’t mind if it goes slightly wrong! I used to do the lines first, but then it was more like colour by numbers. It’s quite nice to do them last, because it’s still like anything can happen.’
‘With stuff like the bin I knew I was at the very limits of my technical competence. I actually did different layers in different paintings and then put them all together. I’m getting better with masking fluid so I could possibly do it, but I just thought the best way to do it was to do all different layers and put them all together last.
'That way you could do all this splattery texture and keep it quite splattery with the different layers, but then it will be coherent when you put them all together again. But the Traction Man pictures are quite traditional.’
With its playful references to films and its clever links between the Traction Man ‘magazine’ and events in the book, Traction Man Meets Turbodog is undeniably a text with appeal to adults as well as children. Grey creates all of her books for a dual audience, and believes their crossover potential is what makes picture books such an exciting medium.
‘I really do think that picture books are a unique art form...they should be for everyone, and why not?'
‘I really do think that picture books are a unique art form. There’s no other way of telling a story that’s like it. There are so many different layers. It happens to be that they get given to children. I think they should be for everyone, and why not? You can’t expect a child until it gets to be about seven or eight to be able to read all the words in a picture book, and for a picture book to be interesting enough it needs to have words that they can understand but won’t be able to read. So you have to have an adult involved in the telling of the story, so it needs to be for the adult as well as the child.’
‘I hope that everything’s getting a bit more mixed up – you’ve got your Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean style stuff, so there’s a broadening out of appeal. Things that are truly crossover are very, very exciting. If a toy has a crossover appeal it’s really special. It’s a bit like that with books as well. Something that can appeal to everyone’s imagination is the pinnacle of what you can make.’
