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The iconic, elusive man in the red-and-white striped shirt was first hidden away in 1987 by British illustrator Martin Handford.
Handford had been drawing since he was a boy, and was particularly fond of viewing and drawing crowd scenes. He felt crowds contained a certain kind of excitement, and he liked to capture it on paper.
After three years of art school, Handford started working as a freelance illustrator, drawing crowd scenes for a variety of magazines and advertising companies. He got the idea for a whole book made up of crowd scenes and approached a publishing company about it in 1986. The art director suggested that he make a character to act as a focal point in his pictures of crowds to encourage people to look at the picture more closely.
After a bit of thought, Handford came up with the distinctive Wally/Waldo character. The round glasses and pom-pom on top of Wally’s head were definitive of Wally’s personality, which Handford described as something like a “train spotter”—a phrase used in England in the 1980s to describe someone who was a bit daft.
In Handford’s own words,
Handford soon started designing the two-page spreads that would make up the first
Where’s Wally? book. It took him as many as eight weeks to finish each picture, which were filled with various other characters doing a myriad of entertaining things. Some of the spreads contain upwards of 3,000 to 4,000 tiny figures, which understandably take some time to create—not to mention the crazy backgrounds, which include everything from a cake factory to a band competition.
The first
Where’s Wally? book was published in the UK in 1987 by Walker Books, followed by publication in the US by first Little, Brown and Company, then Candlewick Press. It featured Wally visiting a bunch of familiar places like the beach and train station.