'History and Her Story'.
Riana Duncan is a Scottish cartoonist and children's book author, mostly known for her 1980s cartoons about office life, sexual politics and relationships, which ran in magazines like Punch and The Spectactor.
Early life and career
Riana Duncan was born in 1950 in Scotland, into a Scottish-Dutch family. Part of her early life was spent in the Netherlands, where she studied at the Free Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague. In early 1975, when she was living in the Dutch city of Haarlem, Duncan was contacted by the Toonder Studio's to help with the inking of the sci-fi newspaper strip 'Arman en Ilva'. Around that time, Gerrit Stapel was taking over the comic from its creators Lo Hartog van Banda and Thé Tjong-Khing. Besides some correspondence and try-out sheets from the studio archives, nowadays part of the collection of the Dutch Museum of Literature, it is unknown whether Riana Duncan ever actually worked on the comic.
Unpublished inking try-out for the Dutch comic strip 'Arman & Ilva' (from the archives of the Toonder Studio's).
Children's books
Eventually, Duncan moved to the UK, where she lived on a sailing vessel in a Hampshire port. After a series of byways, she turned to cartooning and illustrating. During the 1970s and 1980s, she was the author of several children's picture books, mostly animal-related, which she illustrated with ink and watercolors. One of her early books was 'A Tale Of Ten Town Mice' (Andersen Press, 1978). In 1986, she illustrated 'A Nutcracker in a Tree' (Horizon Book Promotions, 1986), a collection of traditional English riddles about animals.
'When Emily Woke Up Angry' (1989).
For Barrons Juveniles, Duncan created a couple of books in which child characters are taught life lessons through animal behavior. In 'If You Were A...' (Barrons Juveniles, 1987), a little boy lets his imagination change him into a bird, then into a dog, and eventually into a lion, until he decides at last that it is most fun to simply be himself. In 'When Emily Woke Up Angry' (Barrons Juveniles, 1989), a girl imitates the angry movements of several animals until she meets a frog who jumps for joy.
Riana Duncan's 'Miss Triggs' cartoon (Punch magazine, 1988).
Cartoonist
As an artist, Riana Duncan however had most impact as a cartoonist. During the 1980s, she was a regular contributor to Punch magazine, and she additionally appeared in The Spectactor, The Guardian, The Observer, Country Living and Men Only, as well as publications in Continental Europe. Recurring topics in her work were the British and their sexual relationships, prejudices and politics. A well-remembered classic has become her 1988 'Miss Triggs' cartoon from Punch magazine, in which she painfully illustrated the world's double standards with it comes to the treatment of men and women in the workplace. As the only woman in the boardroom, Miss Triggs is complimented for her excellent suggestion, after which the executive says "perhaps one of the men here would like to make it?".
From: 'History and her Story' (1986).
Robson Books released several books with Riana Duncan's cartoon work, starting with 'History And Her Story' (1986), a collection of comic strips about the roles of women in history. Other collections were 'Not Tonight: A Cartoon Guide To Sex and the British' (1987), 'The Mating Game' (1988) and 'Riana Duncan's ABC of Sex: A Cartoon Sexicon' (1989). Her work was also featured in the collective cartoon anthology 'The World's Greatest Marriage Cartoons' (Exley Publications, 1995).
Self-portrait.