How Axel Scheffler created everyone’s favourite monster

Twenty-seven short years ago, the Gruffalo lumbered into the beloved bestiary that includes the Lion and the Unicorn, the Jabberwock and the Wild Things. Overnight, this fearsome yet strangely lovable beast became a millennial classic to rival the children’s literary phenomenon that was Harry Potter. A generation of bedtime storytelling has since thrilled to Julia Donaldson’s tale of impending dread in a deep, dark wood. Now, finally, there’s a new Gruffalo story, Gruffalo Granny, announced in advance of a worldwide book launch in September.

I went to meet Axel Scheffler, the artist whose prime as an illustrator has been devoted to his image of this iconic creature, and found myself sitting in off-season sunshine with this slightly rumpled, expat German while he sketched the book character he refers to, with obvious affection, as “my monster”. If there’s a subtle frisson of pride in Scheffler’s voice, that’s because this treasured monster is not just any old ogre but a multimillion-pound superstar.

The Gruffalo, with his “terrible tusks and terrible claws”, first clumped into our children’s consciousness in the spring of 1999. A generation later, Donaldson’s tale of a little brown mouse who “took a stroll” in a fairytale forest, outwitting some fearsome predators to triumph over adversity with plucky cunning, has become part of every child’s imaginative landscape — a contemporary classic inspired by a Chinese fable, “The Fox that Borrows the Terror of a Tiger”. I suspect that quite a few parents will also confess to a mild obsession with this fabulous creature.

Scheffler’s not saying — he’s an easygoing, quite reticent man — but it’s a fair guess that this story has sold many hundreds of thousands of copies. The Gruffalo is now as much part of our children’s inner world as Hansel and Gretel. Here, the artist pauses mid-sketch to observe that such success would have astonished his father, who worried that his dreamy son would never amount to much. Scheffler père was a teenage soldier who’d manned an ack-ack searchlight in Berlin during the final days of the Third Reich. Through the postwar “Wirtschaftswunder” years, in which the country redeemed itself after the horrors of world war, he had been the managing director of a German food factory.

Axel Scheffler is a baby-boomer, born in Hamburg in 1957, who grew up in a broken society remaking itself through hard work. His childhood reading, such as it was, involved Mickey Mouse and a Danish classic about “Petzi”, a naughty little bear. The Scheffler family were devoted to restoring the status quo, and were middle-of-the road in another way, too: they were the kind of anglophile Germans who loved to take English holidays. One idyllic visit to Devon during the magical summer of ’76 became a turning point for Axel; he has a lifelong love of the British landscape. As a quite solitary boy, he would lose himself in drawing. In 1982, having done social work instead of military service in the Bundeswehr, the young conscientious objector packed his paints, brushes, easel and pencils to set off for the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham. It was here, ambushed by his vocation, that he discovered the simple ambition of becoming an illustrator.

The idea that this might be a “proper job” was slow to dawn, but he was happy in England. His early years, Scheffler admits with a wry smile, did not involve too much starving in garrets. From a flat in Streatham, the young artist shopped his work to the magazines that still commissioned illustrations (Time Out; The Listener), and also to a rising generation of children’s book publishers. Walker Books gave him some work, then Faber commissioned a book cover and a set of illustrations for Helen Cresswell’s The Piemakers, followed by some more artwork for Bernard McCabe’s Bottle Rabbit (now a collector’s item). By the early 1990s, Scheffler was collaborating with an up-and-coming children’s book writer named Julia Donaldson, to create illustrations for her latest poem, “A Squash and a Squeeze”, a comic rhyme about farm animals.

Scheffler did not know it, but his new co-author was also in the throes of completing a children’s poem about a little brown mouse who outwits a monster. Better still, she was coming into her own as the possessor of, in the words of one critic, “one of the best ears for prosody since WH Auden”. Donaldson, indeed, had already submitted her “Gruffalo” to a publisher who — for reasons shrouded in shame and mystery — let this quirky poem gather dust during the mid-90s. Eventually, in frustration, she’d recovered her neglected manuscript, dusted it off, and sent it to Scheffler. Was it, she wondered, something he might consider illustrating?

That was a no-brainer, of course. Donaldson’s seductive mix of Chinese folktale with nursery rhyme is touched with genius. “I remember very well reading it,” says Scheffler with Germanic understatement. As luck would have it, he was about to have dinner with a children’s book publisher, who, recognising the timeless brilliance of the poem, did not hesitate to make an immediate offer. Things moved quickly; the die was cast. All at once it became Scheffler’s responsibility to put flesh and bones on Donaldson’s sublime creation.

Inevitably, there was some trial and error in the birth pangs of the terrible “Gruffalo”. Initially, Donaldson pictured her fearsome beast in a rougher guise. Later, she confessed to Scheffler a penchant for the art of Gustave Doré, the French 19th-century book illustrator. Next, their publisher worried that Scheffler’s first sketches might alarm a juvenile audience. The Gruffalo’s eyes were too small; there was a problem with his teeth. Er... In a word, “Could you make him less scary?”