CREATURE COMFORTS

With a third Gruffalo book set to be released in September, Robert McCrum meets Axel Scheffler, the artist behind the green-warted, purple-prickled monster we all know and love

- Robert McCrum

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 yesterday 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