Please help with my essay! I don't know if this is the right sort of thing. I don't really say much about myself and don't know how to include it. (i'm well aware that this is very very last minute!)
Who is this character, this entity that is 'Waldo', or 'Wally' as we call him in the UK? And why are we trying to find him?
What do we gain out of scouring a piece of paper in a book, looking for him? Prizes do not miraculously spring out of the pages. There is no X Factor style elimination round with the best Waldo finder being crowned as having the 'W Factor' and a million pound contract to keep finding Waldos. The most we can gain is a sense of achievement, or in my case, coincidentally being given a 'Where's Wally?' advent calendar for Christmas, a daily piece of chocolate. But maybe that doesn't count, since finding someone I had already found before, on a daily basis, has hardly been taxing.
The short-lived sense of achievement we feel after finding Waldo is soon replaced by, well, nothing. The only thing left to do is to turn the page and search again, a fruitless cycle of finding and losing, much like the relationship I have with my Blackberry.
The thing that really perplexes me, and in turn fascinates me most about Waldo, is that when you really consider it, Waldo is nothing more than an arrangement of ink on a piece of paper.
It is a bizarre thought, obviously not only with Waldo, special as he is, but also with the plethora of drawn characters that exist on the pages of our books and on the television screen. In fact, it brings into light the whole concept of representation and therefore the entirety of art in the traditional sense.
Man has been creating imagery since prehistoric times and we are the only beings to do so. We are familiar with the 'primative' imagery that embodies our idea of the cave man, largely bringing to mind images of simply drawn wildlife, herds of bison consisting of the repetition of rectangles embellished with legs and horns and stick men wielding flint spears. Surely it is a deception of the visual senses if a simple assemblage of lines and shapes is perceived as a representation of the human form or an animal?
Waldo is nothing like the Vitruvian example of a Homo Sapiens. First of all, the bodily proportions are all wrong, his head much too big. There is no muscular definition or curvature in his limbs. He is, basically, a glorified stick man. And the face. Who ever saw a face shaped so very identically to a very tall cup? It is a shape much more suited to being filled with freshly squeezed orange juice. We can surely conclude, Waldo is not very human in form in the slightest. This phenomenon of perceiving faces in inanimate objects, such as in the moon and those hilarious images of toasters having a conversation, is known as 'pareidolia'. You might be thinking, this is completely different, he was meant to be seen as a figure! Yes, but the techniques in drawing him only work because of this occurrence.
What is stranger is the sense of nostalgia and attachment associated with Waldo, and also his personality, which somehow is so aptly exuded, his appeal something that cannot be pinpointed but is summed up through the 'Waldo' aesthetic. He is somebody we can relate to, expressed through his simple outfit, lanky body and nerdy glasses. He is certainly the antithesis of other drawn characters such as Clark Kent or the Hulk. The 'Where's Waldo' books are textually sparse, we create and deduce this personality ourselves from the drawn images we are presented with.
The power of the drawn image is something that I find completely and utterly fascinating. The artist of the Waldo cartoons Martin Handford obviously designed Waldo in this way completely and utterly intentionally, playing on the way we see and the way our brain interprets visuals. The artist has the power of creating something that has never existed before, something that is not just an image but a stream of associations, memories and in this case, hours of enjoyment.
Waldo doesn't really exist, neither in the pages of our books or on our computer screens. But where he does exist is in the mind of Martin Handford. The little man capering through the African Sahara or lounging in the sand in the Caribbean that we are presented with is nothing but a mere projection and communication of the character that Handford built up in his mind and wished to share with the world.
