The book I was most looking forward to this year was Monica “ARE YOU A CHEESEBURGER?” Arnaldo’s MR. S.
Every bit of praise this book is getting is well deserved, but I’m feeling like all the attention is going to the big picture concept. Yes, the book is surprising and mind bending in all the best ways, and, yes, this might be the most real kindergarten in all of picture books, but I’m not sure anyone has written about just how good these kid characters are.
Monica Arnaldo’s work has always had a ton of appeal but these kids are next level. The kids (mostly) share a common silhouette, but each is so wonderfully distinct and distinctly wonderful. Look at these goobers!
The frizzy haired kidThe skeptic
The kid who looks like he stepped out of the 50s
And my favorite:
The “welp” kid
Skin, costume, expression, personality… there’s a masterclass covering those topics in this book. There’s also probably an essay concerning the tradition of drawing groups of kids in this way. I’m thinking of Mary Blair and her concept work for Disney’s IT’S A SMALL WORLD. Maybe another day.
For now, other ways this books is outstanding:
Self-insertsActual kid art. I don’t care how good an artist you are, you just can’t fake this.
And then, of course, there’s the endpapers. But I’m not going to spoil that for you. Go out and buy this book. It’s incredible.
Somewhere early in the project I had the idea I wanted to include some flash fiction in the book. That decision was purely instinct but if I was to break it down, it would probably be because #DonutsForEverybody was always a collaborative project: you gave me the prompts, I made the donuts. I thought a delicious twist on this would be for me to give authors a donut, and have them make a story based on it.
Another reason I wanted this to happen is that this would allow the book to offer something followers didn’t get from the online experience. Creating something new was also important to me. And so…
In hitting up the authors, I gave them a donut and asked if they’d like to write something (anything) inspired by it. I told them the only rule was that it had to be short because a) the project is based on spontaneity, b) the written work had to fit on a single page, and c) this wasn’t a paying gig. There would be no revisions (because who wants to do all that work?) and they were free to tell me to get lost. No one did. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to all the author for their generosity, their willingness to play with me, and their enthusiasm for this experiment.
THE GAME!
Below are three of these fine humans, Kate Allen Fox, Bill Canterbury, and Jess Yoon. Below them are the three donuts they used as a creative prompt. Which donut do you think each author picked? Read their bios, look at the donuts and see if you can match them.
KATE ALLEN FOX!
Kate Allen Fox is an award-winning children’s author from southern California. Her debut picture book, Pando, A Living Wonder of Trees, was published by Capstone in 2021 and named one of the best books of the year by School Library Journal and Chicago Public Library and a finalist for the SCBWI Crystal Kite Award. Little, Brown will publish her second picture book, A Few Beautiful Minutes, in 2023, and Beaming Books will publish Winter Solstice Wish in 2024. Her essays have appeared in several publications, including The New York Times and McSweeney’s. Find her online at kateallenfox.com or on Twitter and Instagram @kateallenfox.
BILL CANTERBURY!
Bill Canterbury is a screenwriter in Los Angeles. He has had many odd jobs, including having been the caretaker of an abandoned summer camp for kids. There were whispers from the cabins and the swings would sway by themselves, so the place was clearly haunted. Or maybe just breezy.
JESS YOON!
Jessica Yoon (she/her) is a second generation Korean American kidlit writer based in Pennsylvania. She is the recipient of the 2023 Highlights Foundation Anti-Bias Book Bearer Scholarship and was an Honorable Mention in the 2022 PBParty and PB Rising Stars Mentorship. As a passionate advocate of representation in children’s literature, Jessica has provided freelance sensitivity reader services to We Need Diverse Books and is a member of the Harrisburg Asian Writers Collective. When she is not writing, Jessica can be found chasing around her two feral children with her spouse or dreaming about her many food cravings.
And here are the donuts:
Galaxy Donut
Anthropomorphized Death by Chocolate Donut
Where the Sidewalk Ends Donut
What are your guesses? Which donut “spoke” to each author? Did Kate recognize humanity’s best-before date in Death by Chocolate? Did Bill recollect the heady LA nights he spent partying alongside Shel Silverstein? Did Jess realize that picking the Big Bang would give her a head start on alliteration?
Put your guesses (and for bonus virtual points, your reasoning) in the comments below.
ps – If you want to see their donutty words, you will have to get the book! Available as a pay what you want pdf download or in delicious paperback.
Besides the packaging and the shipping, there’s this:
It’s the Dozen Days o’ Donuts Book Release Extravaganza! The book is finished and I want to celebrate. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be uploading a series of “making of Donuts For Everybody” posts in acknowledgement of all the work that went into this mighty tome. Topics to be covered:
August 21 Guest Authors Part 1
August 23 How to Shenanigan
August 25 Guest Authors Part 2
August 28 On Revisions
August 29 Alligator What Now?
August 30 Foreword by…
August 31 Guest Authors Part 3
September 5 Blurb-arama
September 6 Hard Headed/Soft Hearted
September 7 Cover Reveal
September 8 BOOK LAUNCH!
There’s a lot here—some of it is fun and games, some of it is process talk, a lot of it is a celebration of community. If you want to immerse yourself fully in the story of this book’s making, you can purchase a copy here. It’ll also be available as a pay what you want pdf download.
But anyway, yeah, 584 donuts. Here’s what 144 of them look like when you put them side by side by side by side by…
Did I tell you I have a book coming out? I have a book coming out. Look! ~~~
It’s my DONUTS FOR EVERYBODY art book, a 144 page celebration of children’s book illustration, community, goodwill, and, of course, DONUTS. It’s at the printer’s AS I TYPE and I’m looking forward to releasing the book in a few short weeks.
Before the book goes live, though, I thought it’d be fun to celebrate the project’s completion with a series of posts dedicated to the entire DONUTS FOR EVERYBODY project. Let’s start with that old chestnut, guess the number of jellybeans in the jar.
Except in this case it’s guess how many donuts I managed to cram into my 144 page book. I can give you some information. There’s about a million fewer than you’ll find in WHO NEEDS DONUTS? by Mark Alan Stamaty.
And maybe a thousand fewer than you’ll find in THE DONUT CHEF by Bob Staake.
Need some more clues? Well, those of you who followed the project will remember I did four donuts days over on Twitter with a dozen and a half donuts per day. There was the Twelve Days of Donuts in December, plus the 144 donuts I made on a livestream back in January.
Some pages hold more than one donut, though. The Strega Nona page, for example, holds six dozen.
Add to this the fact that I can get carried away in creative projects and the knowledge that I had an absolute blast putting this book together.
I think this should get you in the ballpark. Make a guess in the comments below! Closest without going over gets a virtual donut and my warmest regards.
Some time ago someone posted on Twitter that an art director told them drawing dots for eyes was an unworthy shortcut. I couldn’t agree more.
Regardez! Look how good these look!
Seamless.
Mama Mia! That’s-a nice eyeball!
I’ll encourage you to do the same. It’s fun for the whole family….
and good for what ails you.
In closing, I know Buscemi’s eyes are extremely meme-able but I gotta say, he’s probably been my number one favorite actor since I first saw him in IN THE SOUP back in the 90s and I do think he’s a good looking guy. And besides I’m not one to talk about people eyes, as my first tweet would prove:
In one of those moments of synchronicity, Fuse Eight and Kate covered THE RAINBOW GOBLINS in their most recent podcast. What’s the coincidence? Well, I was wrestling with colors today (I’m preparing some large sheets of paper to use in collage illustrations, a technique you’d be most familiar with in Eric Carle’s work) and, like the goblins in the story, found myself elbow deep in acrylics and ethical dilemmas.
blarg
Acrylics are a plastic-based paint and their use releases microplastics into the environment. I don’t use acrylics often, but when I do, I try to keep my water waste to a minimum. I don’t use paint palettes, I use scraps of cardboard or old paper plates that I let dry and then throw away. I use pretty cheap brushes and don’t make an effort to rinse them perfectly clean but nevertheless, when I do run them under the tap, I see rivers of paint pigment, each a constellation of nano-scale plastic particles, swirling down the drain. It’s not a good feeling.
Some of the papers I painted today. The hammer is totally necessary to my process.
The papers, I like those. When the color and pattern come together in a pleasing arrangement, anyway. I could maybe scan them, and then use and reuse them in digital compositions. I don’t know, that doesn’t really excite me. If you’ve seen any one of my donut process videos, you’ll notice I draw on the fly with an x-acto knife. I’m not sure how I’d translate that onto an ipad.
I guess the best I can do is mitigate the amount of harmful byproducts working in this style creates. I’ve started using disposable brushes (which come as a bundle wrapped in plastic) so I can stop washing them all together. They’ll eventually wind up in a landfill which, granted, is only marginally better but it keeps me from worrying about microplastics in our water. The ones I put there, anyway.
You might be wondering what in the Rien Poortvliet I was talking about up in the post title about gnomes living underground. It’s this:
Now those guys knew how to make some eco-friendly paints. I’ve always wondered if Ul de Rico could have been inspired by this cartoon. I seriously doubt it. But then again, I think it was Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci who said the “Baby Mine” sequence in Disney’s DUMBO was one of the greatest scenes in all of cinema, rivalling in beauty the works of Michelangelo (citation needed).
UPDATE: TikTok to the rescue. Turns out there’s another microplastic mitigation technique.
Had to go with a video format to capture my pure contempt for these titles. My only regret is that there isn’t smell-o-vision so you could experience just how stinky these books are.
You might have seen me promise to share the audio recording of Jeff Goldblum reading his part as the Imperial Wizard if my THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES post got more than ten comments. It did (even if six of them were mine), so here you go:
TEX AVERY FINAL THOUGHT!
Just wanted to share this fun line from Joe Adamson’s excellent Tex Avery biography:
The biggest clue you will find, in fact, to the origin of the state of Tex Avery’s humor is the humor of the state of Tex Avery’s origin.
TEX AVERY: KING OF CARTOONS, Joe Adamson (1975)
Adamson connects Tex Avery’s wild imagination to the Texan tradition of “Tall Tales” (think of Pecos Bill’s incredible adventures, for example). Here’s where I’d separate Tex Avery from James Marshall. I think there’s a lot more New England than Texas in Marshall’s dry, understated humor.
KING SIZE CANARY (MGM, 1947)
THE PULLMAN PORTER
Speaking of Pullman Porters, as I was, I wondered if there were any picture books on their history. Turns out there is so I went out and found it.
THE BOMB AND THE GENERAL
Kirk Reedstrom sent me this article about Umberto Eco’s theory of semiotics (“the study of signs and symbols as an anthropological sensemaking mechanism for the world”) and their use in THE BOMB AND THE GENERAL. Thanks, Kirk!
DAILY WATERCOLOR
I fell off the daily watercolor pretty early but I want to get back on that. If I forget, remind me.
NOW TAKING REQUESTS
I have a few ideas for future blog posts but if there’s anything picture book related you would like to hear me talk about, let me know. Put your suggestions in the comments.
It’s an illustrated adaptation of Snyder’s ON TYRANNY: TWENTY LESSONS FROM THE TWENTIETH CENTURY and I’m thinking it should be required reading in middle school. We’re living in worrying times and in children’s books specifically, we’re in pretty dark territory. At a time when you think you’d want kids to have all the information they can have to navigate life, book banning has gone off the charts. The American Library Association reports that there were 1,269 attempted bans in 2022 (a 74% increase over 2021). I’ll admit I don’t know enough to know what happens behinds the scenes at publishing houses when the industry is faced with such a huge number of bans. In a time like this, do publishers shy away from controversial books? Do they capitulate (eg. Texas textbooks)? Or do they double down?
I would hope publishers would double down. Books are always a product of their time—the Environmental movement produced books like Bill Peet’s THE WUMP WORLD (1970) and Dr. Seuss’ THE LORAX (1971)—and in times like these I would love to see more books that straight up call out fascism. This made me wonder what picture books exist that could be called anti-fascist. I looked through my collection to see what I could find.
YERTLE THE TURTLE AND OTHER STORIES by Dr. Seuss (1958)
There’s Yertle, of course, the turtle tyrant who’s unseated by a burping commoner. Seuss did a number of anti-fascist editorial cartoons so his politics are pretty clear even without a Hitler mustache on Yertle (which, apparently, existed in an early draft).
THE BOMB AND THE GENERAL by Umberto Eco and Euginio Carmi (1989)
This book is probably more anti-war (or anti-bomb, if you consider the date) than anti-fascist, but the General in the story gets a comeuppance like Yertle. Maybe a 2/5 on the anti-fascist scale I just made up.
LOUIS I KING OF THE SHEEP by Olivier Tallec (2015)
Tallec’s LOUIS I KING OF THE SHEEP is definitely more anti-fascist. I mean:
It’s a mere gust of wind that brings about Louis’ downfall, not an uprising of oppressed sheep (or even just one burping sheep). The story shows that fascist rule can be fleeting, which is a comfort, but it also ends on a dark note. The crown lands on a wolf, who approaches the herd in the final spread. Lesson: don’t normalize fascist rule, even if it’s just a sheep with delusions of grandeur.
NOODLEPHANT (2019) and OKAPI TALE (2020) by Jacob Kramer and K-Fai Steele
These two! NOODLEPHANT is abolitionist, OKAPI tale is anti-capitalist, but both have elements of anti-fascism. The fascists, in this case, are kangaroos who consider themselves a special class of citizen in Rooville. At the end of NOODLEPHANT, the ruling kangaroos’ book of laws is turned into a tray of lasagna which is shared with all the citizens of the town. The kangaroos are are welcomed in good faith into the animals’ new utopia and they seem content enough (it’s a really good lasagna*). But the happy ending is short lived. OKAPI TALE opens with the kangaroos missing their privilege and collaborating with an okapi(talist) to reestablish their rule.
LOUIS I KING OF THE SHEEP tells us fascism is fleeting, NOODLEPHANT and OKAPI TALE tell us it’s freedom that’s fleeting.
*side note: I read NOODLEPHANT to several second grade classrooms a few years back and WITHOUT FAIL a couple kids would say “Mr. Jerrold, I’m hungry” after the description of Noodlephant’s special lasagna. The book had the same effect on me. Every. Damn. Time. Speaking of food:
ALICE’S RESTAURANT by Arlo Guthrie and Marvin Glass (1966)
This is definitely one of the more anti-fascist books I have in my collection. Granted, it isn’t really a kid’s picture book (just look at that cover), but except for some explicit language, it works like one.
What makes ALICE’S RESTAURANT so anti-fascist? Well, it describes the dangers of living in a police state, under the expectations and demands of an arbitrarily violent government.
The bureaucracy in the story is dehumanizing and is so familiar that it barely feels like satire. Thankfully, ALICE’S RESTAURANT does prescribe a salvation from fascism: get friends, get naked and dance your way out of it.
And finally, the last book:
KEEDLE, THE GREAT by Deirdre and William Conselman, Jr and Fred L. Fox adapted by Jack Zipes (2020)
KEEDLE, THE GREAT is a recent adaptation of a book written about 80 years ago. From the book’s notes:
In 1940, two young people decided to publish a strange book with the title Keedle to give Americans hope that the world can overcome dictatorships. To them, Keedle represented more than Hitler. Indeed, he represented all the dictators in the world then and now. This book is a reminder that we have always ridiculed authoritarian regimes. When we keep the power to laugh in their faces, the bullies will shrink away as we retain our integrity and humanity.
In the story, a little sociopath named Keedle rises to greater and greater power until the world decides to laugh at him. At which point:
He begins to grow smaller:
Until he can be squished like a flea:
The message in Keedle: you have to take the threat of fascism seriously, but what you don’t have to do is treat a fascist with any kind of respect. Pow!
OTHER BOOKS
I suppose you could make the argument that any picture book with a subversive protagonist is antifascist and that kids, already tuned into an unjust world, will catch on. Maybe. But, personally, feeling more and more that kids are inheriting a much worse world than the one I grew up in, I’m kind of done with subtlety. I was watching HISTORY OF THE WORLD: PART II and Mel Brooks gets it right. In a skit about Hitler, the writers go to great lengths to remind you what a disgusting pile of shit Hitler was. It’s a lot harder to say “disgusting pile of shit” in a picture book, but maybe there’s a way to say book banners, climate deniers, transphobes and all those other bad actors who are hell bent on making our world worse with every passing day are, like fascists, extremely poopy.
I’ll hold on to the hope that publishers are presently making these antifascist books and look forward to them coming out in the near future. You know, before all libraries and public schools lose all their books and are shuttered permanently.
a group of children’s book authors and illustrators heading to the library
On the topic of updating classic works (see James Marshall post) I wanted to talk about this one:
When I tell you I’m a big fan of THE CRICKET IN TIMES SQUARE, please believe me. I’m a big fan of THE CRICKET IN TIMES SQUARE. One of my prized kidlit possessions is a copy of the book (tenth printing, 1966) signed by George Selden.
I read it first as a student in Mrs. Boehlke’s third grade classroom at Jakarta International School and it made a big impression on me. The book painted New York as magical, of course, but it also cemented Connecticut as a place I desperately wanted to visit (never mind that I had access to coral reefs and rainforests in Indonesia, I wanted to see a bubbling brook in a Connecticut field). The descriptions of music left me tracking down the various overtures and arias that made up Chester’s repertoire and the animal’s feasts inspired a life-long love of liverwurst (it’s still one of my favorite sandwiches). Looking back, though, I wonder if what made me fall in love with the story was that it’s the first one I ever read where I saw myself in the protagonist. Like Mario, I was a lonely kid who loved animals.
me around the time I read the book
I don’t remember feeling any particular way about the representation of Sai Fong, the older Chinese gentleman who plays a part in several chapters, but I do recall finding having to swap the Ls and Rs in his dialogue a bit tedious (Selden swaps the letters in that familiar way, “Velly good” and “most honalable” etc). It’s tedious and annoying and, or course, insensitive. If the book has a saving grace, it’s that the Chinese characters are sympathetic. Sai Fong (and his friend, another Chinese gentleman) help Mario and Chester early in the story and then return towards the book’s end and get to share in Chester’s triumphant final concert.
The portrayal of Asian characters in THE CRICKET IN TIMES SQUARE isn’t BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S level obnoxious, far from it, but I would agree that the book (given its status as a perennial classic) could use an update. I was excited to learn last year that there was a revised and updated version in the works and, naturally, picked it up as quickly as I could.
I might have expected the only revision to be the removal of Sai Fong’s broken English but there are a few other changes. Sai Fong’s Emporium (a bric-a-brac and novelty store) is now a music shop, which makes sense given the themes of the book, but Chester, who is a natural musician is now referred to as first a fighting cricket and then a poet. The legend of Hsi Shuai is gone, I’m assuming this is because Selden’s version is probably not accurate or maybe it’s not his story tell. But if the book is updated and the revisions are credited to an Asian author, couldn’t you say that part of the story belongs to them? I’m not sure why the legend was removed, but I kind of miss it. I feel a bit of the magic is gone. It’s a tough assignment, keeping Chinatown an particularly unique destination (Mario, a born and bred New Yorker had never traveled there) without relegating it and Sai Fong to a “magical minority” role.
But I’m not writing about any of that. My concern with the reissue is that the book’s producers have completely messed up the art. I’m going to share some scans from the 1973 Dell Yearling edition (pictured on the left) and the 2022 revised and updated edition (pictured on the right). I’ve scanned then at the same resolution, how you see them is how they would look side by side.
1973 Dell Yearling edition
2022 revised edition
You’ll notice the original has a lot of blank space at the top and bottom of the page. The art in the new edition has been set to “stretch to fill” (a command that will have an image asset stretch vertically and horizontally to eliminate empty areas on the page) and as a result, the image is distorted. It’s not such a big deal if the object is stretching proportionally along both axes. But if you’re stretching a lot only in one direction, then you get something like this:
1973 Dell Yearling edition
2022 revised edition
Most of the images in the new edition have suffered some distortion but the majority are only scaled a little. The illustration of Chester, Harry and Tucker celebrating a farewell dinner (which also serves as the book’s cover) is scaled around 7% taller. I doubt most readers without a side-by-side would notice any difference.
1973 Dell Yearling edition
2022 revised edition
But the difference is there. I’ve overlaid them at the same scale so you can see how much it’s stretched (cyan lines added to show there’s no horizontal scaling).
Twelve years ago Phil Nel wrote about an updated version of James Marshall’s THE THREE LITTLE PIGS in a blog post titled Vandalizing James Marshall. Would I call this Vandalizing Garth Williams? I don’t know. Marshall’s book had its trim size changed to fit a mass market model. That was unfortunate (as was the use of Edmunds as the book’s new typeface). With the updated edition of THE CRICKET IN TIMES SQUARE, I feel like the art issue is carelessness more than anything. If the white space surrounding the art was a concern, the easiest fix would have been to fill it with those text descriptors you see in older chapter books. Something like this:
2022 edition, “corrected” image with subtitle added by Jerrold
Then again, I can’t help but think the illustrations were enlarged to target a younger audience. Maybe there’s a feeling third graders these days aren’t interested in reading about talking animals (ugh). If that’s the root of these art and layout changes, that would seem to be an editorial decision not in keeping with the book’s original intent and I’d be inclined to call it vandalism. If the revised edition goes into reprint, maybe they could return the art to its original aspect ratio. How do we make that happen?
