Where’s Wally? is a British series of children’s puzzle books created by illustrator Martin Handford. The books consist of a series of detailed double-page spread illustrations depicting dozens or hundreds of people doing a variety of amusing things at a given location. Readers are challenged to find a character named Wally and his friends hidden throughout the pages. --WP

TBH, I only have a passing familiarity with this series. Certainly I like the LC-style art and premise, but I’m afraid my eyes are kind of weak for these kinds of puzzles. Still, as pure art pieces, I feel like the landscape-style scenes have some real charm, not unlike the super-cute animal tableaus of Richard Scarry.

Just for the record: I’m playing around with the title on purpose. As someone who’s lived in the States since forever, I absolutely heard of “Waldo” long before “Wally.” But maties-- is this not EGN+? 😜

2011’s Where’s Wally World Record event in Dublin, Ireland

In 1986, U. of Creative Arts in Kent graduate Handford was asked by art director David Bennett to develop a book of detailed crowd scenes inspired by Philippe Dupasquier’s Busy Places series. Whilst the book was being prepared for the Bologna Book Fair, someone at Walker Books suggested the idea of adding a distinctive-looking character whom the reader could search for in the crowd scenes. After much thinking, Handford came up with the idea of “Wally”, a world traveller and time travel aficionado who always dresses in red and white. Sometimes it would take him up to eight weeks to draw a two-page sketch of the elusive “Wally” and the characters surrounding him. The first Where’s Wally? book was published in Sep '87.

As the series goes on, Wally becomes increasingly harder to find, reducing his size on the page and surrounding him by more characters. In the first book, Wally was on average one cm2 big. This was reduced to 0.80 cm2 in the second book, 0.33 cm2 in the third, and between 0.20 and 0.17 cm2 in the fourth through seventh books! He’s also been surrounded by more & more characters, from 225 in the very first page to about 850 on the last book’s first page.

• Odlaw appears nearly the same as Wally, except that his clothes are yellow and black-striped instead of red and white; his glasses have a blue tint to them; and he has a moustache. He also has a British accent in the television series. Although it is told that “his bad deeds are many,” he is not depicted in the books doing anything particularly nasty. However, in the television series, he is frequently seen to be attempting to steal Wally’s magical walking stick! 😤

• Odlulu is a villainous pre-teen female Anti-Wanderer who is a gender-bend version of Odlaw and despises the Wanderers in the new series. She is plotting to obtain the Wanderer keys and take control of the world. She sometimes help out Wally and Wenda for their quest, then turns everything back to normal after causing random chaos, somewhere.