The author of some of the most startling graphic stories of recent years is not what you’d expect of an artist, but then his are not your typical picture books

“Drawing a good picture is like telling a really good lie – the key is in the incidental detail,” says Shaun Tan. Fortunately, the Australian artist’s award-winning picture books are anything but short on detail. Each spread drops the reader into a surreal world of bizarre animals, skew-whiff buildings, dreamlike landscapes and invented languages, the magical realism and conceptual playfulness of Tan’s paintings underscoring the simple language of the tales – “illustrated modern fables” as he calls them.

In the stunning, wordless graphic novel The Arrival, sober-looking characters dressed in 1930s-style suits and bowler hats are accompanied on their journeys through a mysterious city by strange creatures reminiscent of Philip Pullman’s daemons (only much, much weirder). The Lost Thing is a huge metal contraption from some other world, “hidden” by the boy who finds it in his parents’ otherwise relatively conventional house; next to the words “nobody understands”, the central character in The Red Tree is seen wearing a weighty diving mask, huddled in a glass bottle on a stormy shoreline, in one of the most unnerving insights into depression ever drawn.

“The detail adds an element of unexpected something,” Tan explains. “All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details. I’m constantly testing with the details. I go on a hunch and try it out. I might have a character and have a feeling that he needs to have a hat and so I put it in and it feels right and then I realise that he needs to have a hat because he’s trying to hide something.”

The result of this careful attention to detail is that Tan’s worlds, however fantastical they may appear on first glance, have their own internal logic. It is what he describes as “groundedness”, and he regards it as crucial to the success of the stories.

“By itself, just to draw crazy creatures has limited appeal – if I had to give up one thing it would be the wild imagination. When the work becomes too detached from ordinary life it starts to fall apart. Fantasy needs to have some connection with reality or it becomes of its own interest only, insular. In The Lost Thing, to have creatures flying around is unsatisfactory without the context. It works because it exists in opposition to the world in the rest of the story.”

To meet the man behind the wildly surreal pictures brings home that sense of opposites. Compact, neatly dressed and precise in speech, the initial impression is less the artist bubbling over with crazy creativity, than an accountant, albeit a very bright and charming one. Tan speaks thoughtfully, carefully about his work and there’s a clue to the origins of this precision when he talks about his upbringing in Perth, western Australia. His father was an architect and Tan recalls spending hours as a child drawing pictures on the back of discarded architectural sketches.

“I learnt some of my style from him,” says Tan, “including the extreme attention to detail. There’s that sense that if you do something it has to be well-crafted and it’s more fun that way and you get a better thing at the end.”

Yet despite parents with an interest in art and a childhood spent carefully observing and documenting in pictures the world around him – “I was always head down, looking at objects on the beach, almost fixated on collecting seashells and bumping into something that’s unexpected” – it was not a given that Tan would pursue illustration as a career. He flirted with the idea of becoming a scientist – a fascination carried over into The Lost Thing, where the images are framed with collages from physics and maths textbooks.

But, at 16, he had his first illustration published in an SF magazine and discovered the thrill of seeing his work in print. “One of the attractions of working on the books is the idea of people you don’t know seeing your work and forming an opinion about it. Seeing your work in print is exciting, especially when you’re young. It’s that feeling that you have some effect on the world outside of your immediate neighbourhood,” says Tan.

A joint degree in English and fine art followed, while he continued to sell illustrations to magazines. But even then he wasn’t convinced that he could make a living as an artist. “I didn’t want to starve in a garret. For me, the main thing was to secure a livelihood and then explore artistic interests. I was fairly conservative like that,” says Tan, laughing now at the memory.

He decided to give art a year after finishing university and see how it went. He soon found that, by saying yes to everything that he was offered, from commercial illustration and fantasy novel book covers to occasional cartoons, and drawings of microscopes, he could make his way and then start creating his own books.

Given his secure, happy childhood and what seems to have been a relatively straightforward path into a successful career, it is perhaps surprising that Tan’s work is quite as dark as it is. Although often categorised as a creator of children’s “picture books”, the deeper, bleaker issues he tackles belies any such pigeonholing. The Red Tree is a blistering portrait of depression, while The Arrival is a masterful examination of the immigrant experience, and The Rabbits (illustrated by Tan but written by John Marsden) is a powerful allegory of environmental destruction. While The Arrival, thanks to its sheer length and sepia tones if nothing else, falls most easily into “graphic novel” territory, Tan’s other books occupy a kind of hinterland which can make them difficult to market.

“None of my books are for anybody – I don’t have any image of a child reading my book when I produce them,” says Tan. “It’s unfortunate sometimes that they are marketed to children. It’s good that kids get them, but that can exclude adults.

“One bookseller in Australia took the children’s book award sticker off The Red Tree as he felt he could sell more that way, and sold an extra 30-40 copies a month. It’s about simple things like font size – people think they can judge the age a book is for by the font size and assume that it’s for little kids if it has a big font, but that’s silly. I don’t worry too much about those things as the creator because I figure that the books will find their own audience and sometimes I like the idea that they can give adults a surprise pleasure.”

There is indeed always a “surprise pleasure” despite the seriousness of the topics Tan takes on. The books are leavened not only in the flashes of humour in Tan’s richly imaginative drawings, which he describes as “conscious dreaming”, but the thread of hope and compassion woven through every tale, however initially bleak.

“I think stories that represent the world as hopeless or dark are valid and some of them I really enjoy but the truth is that there is hopefulness in every situation,” says Tan. Of The Red Tree, he says that “the expression of depression is somehow refreshing. You can deal with things if you acknowledge them – it makes you feel good to acknowledge stuff.” Even in The Rabbits, although the “text is grim”, the images are redemptive, especially as it ends with “two misunderstood beings trying to communicate with each other across pool of stars, to overcome their cultural blindness and ask questions about what they are doing.”

These kinds of attempts to communicate across divides are a key theme in Tan’s books. His characters are often outsiders who have trouble articulating their feelings, something Tan says he recognises from when he was growing up and used drawing to help to express himself. The characters find themselves in strange situations but, ultimately, cope by “using empathy to get through, overcoming apathy.”

Tan is reluctant to delve too deeply into the “meanings” of his fables. Towards the end of The Lost Thing he writes, “Well, that’s it. That’s the story. Not especially profound, I know, but I never said it was. And don’t ask me what the moral is.” When pressed on the The Red Tree and the sudden chink of light at the end of the story with the appearance of a magical tree, he suggests that
“The Red Tree is there because this girl has somehow persisted and if there is any moral to the story – if you had to force a moral at it would be something to do with persistence.”

Morals or not, what shines through Tan’s work is an essential humanity, whether it is arrivals in a new city silently describing their journeys from war zones to a fragile new life, a metal mammoth happy to be found a place where he doesn’t quite fit, or a girl who finds a speck of hope, “bright and vivid, quietly waiting”, where previously there was only darkness.

• Shaun Tan’s latest work, Tales from Outer Suburbia (Templar) is an anthology of 15 very short illustrated stories. Each one is about a strange situation or event that occurs in an otherwise familiar suburban world.