Award-winning Kiwi cartoonist Toby Morris tells Kim Hill working on his latest book Dad Man Walking was "a bit of a reprieve" from his regular gig illustrating Covid-19 explainers for the World Health Organisation.
Toby Morris Photo: By Toby Morris - https://www.flickr.com/photos/163760355@N03/46884259242/, CC BY 2.0
In Dad Man Walking - which has an introduction by Clarke Gayford - Morris depicts the five phases of lockdown homeschooling which starts out sensible and structured before descending into chaos.
"As parents at the moment, you just have to do whatever works, really, whatever gets you through the day."
Morris had never imagined illustrating scientific information before his collaboration with science communicator Siouxsie Wiles on a series of Covid-19 visual explainers that were a hit internationally.
Drawings simply help make things clearer and are also a way to convey emotion directly.
"The beauty of comics is you can condense a lot of information that would take paragraphs and paragraphs to write, information about tone and emotion and setting and the feeling of a place… comics are really effective at communicating that really quickly.
"I often think that the words are the facts and the images can be the feeling. You can get across the rational factual messaging in the text and the emotional [content] is in the drawings.
"If you can turn the pictures off and read the words and get 100 percent of the meaning anyway, it probably shouldn't have been a comic in the first place."
Photo: Siouxsie Wiles and Toby Morris / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)
Morris has loved drawing since he was a kid and looked up to New Zealand political cartoonists Tom Scott and Trace Hodgson, and the "father of comics journalism" Joe Sacco.
Morris says his comics often involve journalistic work. For a piece about housing inequality in his monthly comic series The Side Eye, he spent a rainy day interviewing a Wellington woman about.
He considers himself a political cartoonist with a lower case 'p' and a particular interest in equality and ethics.
The work of the cartoonist is to challenge cultural assumptions and things we take for granted as normal, Morris says.
"I see that as [our] role, to look at things that everybody assumes that's the way it has to be and say 'we could do this better' or why do we do things like this?"
