Australian cartoonist and rider Maryanne Wallace started putting her drawings into comic format four years ago — capturing those moments with horses that we all know only too well.
“I have two quirky horses (is there any other kind?), that I keep at livery in Australia,” says Maryanne. “And I have wonderful friends at the yard whose horses provide great inspiration for my comics.”
Through her cartoons she charts the ups and downs that life with horses bring us — and that we can manage to crack a smile about when we have a moment to take a step back.
“My horse Halo loves food. I can’t underline, bold, or uppercase that enough. He’s a pretty cruisey dude most of the time,” says Maryanne, who has a day job in marketing.
“I have another horse Jackson who is a very elderly thoroughbred, but he doesn’t seem to know that and has been enjoying retirement from riding duties for over 10 years. Jackson can be flighty and a big scaredy-cat, so he is also great inspiration.
“I don’t need to worry about Jackson breaking into the feed shed. He won’t even stand in his big deluxe el-primo shelter shed. Halo on the other hand would happily burst through the roof of the feed shed, lowered from a helicopter Mission-Impossible style if it got him a snack.”
How many of these cartoons ring a bell?
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A graduate from Durham University, Madeleine joined H&H in 2011 and became Features Editor — producing content across the magazine and website, including the popular inside back cover article ‘The horse that made me’ and the weekly ‘The best of my fun…’ interview. She has written on topics as diverse as hay making and headcams, to hot totty in the horse world and circus horses. Madeleine now works as a freelance feature writer for Country Life, The Telegraph, Horse & Hound, cntraveller.com, The Spectator and The Field, as well as writing obituaries for The Times.
