Peaco Todd

Illustrator Uses Wit to
Communicate Perspective
on Business—AND Parenting

Peaco Todd’s career has taken her from a San Francisco walk-up to a sixty-foot yacht, from the Persian Gulf to Route 128, from the beaches of Greece to tweedy Cambridge. She’s never fulfilled her girlhood dream of writing novels, but she’s delighted hundreds of thousands with the wit and whimsy in her cartoons, cards and even a tongue-in-cheek “girl’s guide” to football.

Today Todd is settled in a quiet studio in a Boston suburb, where she delights in “psyching out” the books she’s hired to illustrate. She especially enjoyed the process of creating the cartoons for Family Matters: Parenting Tips from the Business World, written by Roni Jay and just published by Parenting Press.

Despite the fact that Todd didn’t grow up in a large family, has no children of her own and has never worked in a large corporation, Jay’s recommendations ring true for her.

“This book is really about respect, about treating children and their problems with respect,” she notes.

Jay’s suggestions that parents treat children as customers also resonate with Todd, who as an entrepreneur has had years of experience with customers. Starting out as a department store advertising copywriter, she later did freelance writing, including user guides for software companies. She got started on one of her current career paths about twenty years ago, when her then-neighbor Amy Tan, now well-known as the author of The Joy Luck Club, recommended a workshop on selling illustrations to the greeting card industry. The samples Todd worked up for the session resulted in a five-year contract for sixteen word-play cards that were sold around the world. Not long after, Hallmark Cards hired her to draw images being used in a product licensing project.

Within a year or two, Todd was back on the East Coast, living on Martha’s Vineyard on a sailboat and developing yet another entrepreneurial skill: painting names on boat hulls. Soon she and her then-fiancé were off to deliver the trimaran “Rogue Wave” to Dubai, U.A.E. After 6,000 miles of sea and sun, she was ready to go home. But the job she found herself in on Route 128—writing yet another user guide—was so boring she decided to create a set of accompanying illustrations. By that time Todd had found yet another career path for herself: teaching. She had hired on at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, a well-respected noncredit program just steps from Harvard Square, and joined the faculty at what is now Lesley University.

Today, besides teaching and illustrating, Todd is still selling. Her cartoons are syndicated by Artizans and her web site, www.peacotoons.com, sells mugs, mouse pads and other merchandise imprinted with your choice of cartoon. That’s not all: committed to demonstrating the value of sports for girls, especially “tweens,” she’s developing a new story and product line as well as an interactive web site.