Feature Article

 

 

 

 

 

Southampton writer's character 

Marvin the sheep is a global success

By Sally Churchward 

Senior Feature Writer

HE is an international star.

He has fans in China, Japan, Korea, Germany, Holland, Iran, Slovakia, France – the list goes on.
And he comes from Southampton . Or rather his creator, Joseph Theobald does.
Marvin the sheep became known globally by children aged between two and eight thanks to the huge success of Joseph’s first book Marvin wanted MORE!
Since that first hit, which was a best-seller for publisher Bloomsbury, selling some 300,000 copies and being translated into ten languages, two more Marvin books have hit the shelves, Marvin Gets MAD! and Marvin and Molly, which came out a few weeks ago.
Joseph published Marvin and Molly himself. It is new territory for him, as is the App that he has also published, giving children the chance to have the book ‘read’ to them by a narrator.
Joseph, 37, has always been a keen painter. He decided to go into writing and illustrating children’s books after a chance meeting with a successful children’s writer.
“I was studying illustration and living on a houseboat in Falmouth when Jane Simmons, creator of Daisy the Duck, parked her houseboat next to me,”
“She thought that my style would be good for children’s books because it was bright and colourful. She taught me everything she knew.” explains Joseph, who lives in Portswood.
Joseph wrote and illustrated his first book while still studying and secured an agent when it won the prestigious Macmillan Prize for unpublished children’s authors.
“I was doing my dissertation about environmentalism and corporations and the question came to me ‘why do people want more when they’ve already got so much?’. I was thinking about greed and the mindless search for power. Trying to put that into a children’s book was quite a feat but then I got the idea for a sheep, which is a metaphor for the way humans sometimes are, consuming without thinking. But I didn’t want it to come across as being political for kids.”
As well as writing and illustrating the Marvin books, Joseph has illustrated other people’s books and has written and illustrated educational books for children.
It’s a career he loves, but in the ten years he has been working in the industry he has seen it change, with book shops closing and publishers reducing their output.
This prompted him to publish the third Marvin book himself.
The book was printed in Southampton by Indigo Press by Joseph’s new publishing company Sheepsy.
“I had some money and some time so I thought I would give it a go,” he says.
“There is a growing interest in Apps (software for mobile devices) and I knew some people who were interested in getting a children’s book App out – a company called Pekingese Puppy – so we got together and did that as well.”
Being a children’s author is the kind of career that many people dream of and Joseph admits that when it’s good, it’s very good.
“At times it’s the best job in the world,” he says with a wide smile.
“My favourite part is the painting. Once I have the story ready, I love that – waking up, taking a few steps to my desk and painting.
“I paint in acrylic on watercolour paper. All I need to work is a small desk and my paints. Quite often I take the work and live somewhere else for a while. I’ve combined it with travelling to places like India and Asia. I usually spend a few months somewhere I like and do my painting or writing there.
“The frustrating part of the job is when you don’t have any ideas. At the beginning I used to get more frustrated but once I started combining the writing with going off to live somewhere beautiful and peaceful I stopped getting so frustrated!”
One of the other frustrations is condensing a story into the right length for a picture book.
“It can be difficult getting a proper story with a beginning, a middle and an end into three to four hundred words and having it there in 12 double page spreads,” he says.
“I’ve had to reject my own stories that I’ve tried and tried to fit into that format but haven’t been able to get to work.
“That’s an interesting thing with Apps, that you can use sound and animation. It can be difficult to describe a lively scene or some action in a book, but you can show it with a twosecond animation.”
Bloomsbury have shown interest in publishing Marvin and Molly, which Joseph says would be appealing as it would mean he had more time for writing and painting, but he plans to carry on developing educational Apps.
In the meantime he needs to sell at least a third of the Marvin and Molly books he has had printed to make his money back – not that that is likely to be too much trouble, given how many fans the series has.
Among those fans are his niece and nephew, Marianne and Jon, to whom he has dedicated the most recent book.
“Marianne’s school friends never believe that I’m her uncle,”
he says.
“That’s why I put her name in to prove it!”
* For more information and to download a free App or buy the Marvin and Molly App visit sheepsy.com or find Marvin the Sheep on Facebook.

 www.sheepsy.com