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Tate Books have reissued the vintage David McKee book ‘Big-Top Benn’ in hardback, handy for that Xmas present where you want to impress the parents as much as the kids. It’s gorgeous too, alternating between colour paintings and black and white line work, with some of McKee’s freakiest work landscape-wise. All the pictures are drawn ‘flat’ with the perspective seemingly looking down from above, if a road turns in a different direction the houses or hills follow it so that, sometimes they are upside down on the page. Mr Benn trying on his clown’s costume in the changing room illustrates this perfectly too.

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Talking of David McKee, when my wife was 5 years old, her (very hip) mother took her to a McKee book signing in Kensington for the release of a Melric the Magician book. Upon meeting the artist, my wife, who was very shy then, was completely speechless, to make her feel better McKee drew a witch on a broomstick with a cat on the inner cover and signed it.