When Julie Danielson and I were researching the for-grown-ups version of the James Marshall, she coordinated a call for us with Sheldon Fogelman, Jim’s agent. We hopped on a conference line and had a casual chat about his memories of working with Jim. If we had any secret hopes for good dirt (I did have those hopes), they were quickly dashed because “Shelly” (as he asked us to call him) spoke with nothing but the highest respect for his old client. At one point Shelly said “Jim was one of the two nicest people I ever worked with in publishing.” I asked him who the other was and he said “Jerry Pinkney”.
I’m on the road right now and passing some time at a public library. I was hoping to read Pinkney’ autobiography JUST JERRY but it’s checked out. In place of that, I’m reacquainting myself with his various takes on Aesop’s fables and am (as always) amazed at how much the warmth and humor in these just jump off the page. My feeling is that Shelly must have been playing it cool, there’s no way the person who drew and painted this wasn’t one of the kindest humans on the planet.
The Lion and the Mouse (2009)
I was thinking of doing a post about the fable collections of done by Arnold Lobel and James Marshall in sort of a head-to-head “who did it better” type thing. (For some reason I always think of Aesop in the spring). Not to spoil things, but I see now I’m going to have to widen the bracket. ‘Til March, my friends.
Today I want to give a shout out to my friend Maisha Oso. I met Maisha in the Picture Book Rising Stars program where we were both mentor for the class of 2023. I became a fan of Maisha’s BUSTER THE BULLY and asked Maisha if she’d be willing to write a short piece for my DONUTS FOR EVERYBODY project. Maisha agreed and wrote a PERFECT poem that holds a special place in my book. I was already grateful for her contribution, but in recent months I’ve come to realize how generous Maisha was because the poem she wrote for me must have been composed while juggling of a number of other projects. How do I know? Because Maisha is out here knocking book after book out of the park.
I’m not talking about the art in this post but Candice Bradley captured something really beautiful here.
BEFORE THE SHIPS came out last year and immediately found its place on several “Best of” lists. A quick side note: there are a lot of people out there who are really good at writing book reviews, I’m not sure I’m one of them. I can get lost in the weeds when I’m digging into a book and I tend to overthink my response. In this case, though, I knew what I wanted to say:
Maisha’s other 2024 release was MY HAIR IS A BOOK. It, too, found its place on Best of lists (the one I’m most jealous of is the New York Public Library’s) and on my desk.
NYPL is way more prestigious and also, probably, a lot tidier.
I’m thinking my way through the review I want to write for MY HAIR IS A BOOK and the one word that keeps coming to mind is BOLD. The writing has a lot of wordplay, and I don’t mean yok-yok punny wordplay, I mean things like double meanings. The title itself tells the analogy at play, MY HAIR IS A BOOK, but within that is the idea that each strand is a story, each twist an event, and each braid a memory. (That last bit brought to mind an animated short, LADY WITH LONG HAIR by Barbara Bakos which is a whole different kind of story and storytelling, but it was nice to be reminded of it.)
There is, too, some amount of joyous wordplay (pick it/picket) and in-jokes (undefeated!) that reads so naturally. None of it is corny (see, I was almost tempted to write “corn-row-y” which is terrible and which proves Maisha is way better at this than I’d ever be) and the rhythm of the entire book is such that even a half-bald goofball who almost said “corn-row-y” can sound good reading it.
But most of all, MOST of all, what I love about MY HAIR IS A BOOK is that the writing was so clearly in Maisha’s voice that it reminded me of the poem she gave me for DONUTS and how lucky I am to count Maisha as a friend and that made me happy.
MONTANA DIARY is a comic journal by Whit Taylor, detailing a summer’s road trip across “Big Sky Country”.
Whit’s journey across Montana is beset with anxiety. First from being a Black traveler in a very white, very red state (where Whit sees Confederate memorabilia on display at a gift shop).
Then from nature itself. An imagined stalking bear turns out to be a territorial grouse (their fears weren’t unfounded, they would later encounter a bear on the same hike).
Whit’s anxiety comes across as does the irony of not being able to breathe in Big Sky Country. Eventually, Whit manages to be more present with her surroundings and this is where the zine digs into the history of Montana and its indigenous people as preserved by museums in various National Parks.
This reference to National Parks is why the zine is on my mind. National Park employees have been laid off en masse under the guise of “government efficiency” but is really nothing more, as far as I’m concerned, than a longer term play to privatize public lands and turn the Grand Canyon into a casino and Big Sky Country into a tar pit. I wish more people would call these layoffs out for being just that. I can’t be the only one who sees this, can I?
Whit’s zine ends with some tender watercolor observations that feel bittersweet. They remind me beautiful places exist and make me glad National Parks exist.
So back in the Black Mother Goose post I mentioned briefly being interested what other ways an author might have translated traditional (mostly British English) nursery rhymes for a 20th century Black American audience. You might wonder, after all, what a kid in 1980 New York would care about Doctor Foster going to Gloucester. Why not rewrite that as “Doctor Carver went to Harvard” (the fact that George Washington Carver went to Iowa State University notwithstanding).
Well, it wasn’t in Elizabeth Murphy Oliver’s goals to modernize these poems but a few years later, a good number of traditional fairy and folktales were given that treatment by Fred Crump Jr.
Caricature of Fred Crump Jr. by D. J. Koffmann
There isn’t a lot of biographical information on Fred Crump Jr. online, the most thorough can be found in a post at cartoonist D. J. Koffman’s blog here. Many of the comments in reply to that post share fond memories of a person who was clearly a dedicated teacher and artist. Crump illustrated over forty books, a great majority of which are the retold fairy tales. They’re rare, but not impossible to come by. The two in my collection were purchased from a bookstore in Michigan but you’ll see them often enough on ebay (though the rarer titles start running up in price).
Little Red Riding Hood (1989)
Jamako and the Beanstalk (1990)
You can tell just by the covers that Crump’s illustration style is very much in the newspaper comic strip tradition. The linework is consistent and clear, the composition is kind of two-dimensional, the hand-written text is cartoony, and the text is set in clean, white boxes. Those descriptions might sound like the work is overly simplistic and although I certainly don’t take for granted how challenging making clearly readable illustrations is, I’ll admit I haven’t really spent a lot of time really looking at the illustrations in Red and Jamako. That changed a few days ago when I saw this post on Laguna Vintage’s Instagram.
This is an illustration from Crump’s Hansel and Gretel retelling and it made me look at his work in a whole new way. I was absolutely engrossed by this illustration. I love the shimmering fairy dust, I love the art nouveau design on the fairy’s wings, I love the face on the tree and the sleeping owl. It feels more Walt Disney and less Jim Davis. I can imagine a kid being OBSESSED with this story.
Honestly, that story is such a gift to kids. I want to go back in time and see a little guy covering his eyes at the scary witch in the window the first time his mom read him this book. I’m thankful this Laguna Vintage repost crossed my feed, I’m all in on Crump now.
I found another blog with an early Fred Crump Jr. book, Marigold and the Dragon. In these illustrations you can see that Crump started out with much more of a comic strip look. Vintage Kids Books My Kid Loves likened Crump’s work of that era to Mad Magazine’s Don Martin and I think that’s pretty apt.
I’d love to get both editions of Marigold and the Dragon to see how Crump redid the story and art, but like I said, the rarer titles are a bit harder to come across.
In terms of story, the text reminds me, in the best of ways, of the stories you could have read to you when you called the “Storytime” number from the Yellow Pages (I don’t know if anyone else remembers this, but back in the day latchkey kids could call a phone number and have a prerecorded story read to them). Again, I’m hinting at the fact that the stories are predominantly “clear and concise” and again, as I was with the illustrations, I’m probably wrong to leave it at that. There are certain details, word choices beyond replacing European names with African ones, that give these books what I think must be a Fred Crump flavor—the peddler in Jamako and the Beanstalk is described as “raggedy” and the beanstalk grows in “loopity swoops”. All in all, it really charming and I’m looking forward to spending more time with these books.
Avy Jetter, who posts on IG as @nuthingoodat4, does a drawing a day every February in honor of Black History Month. At the end of February these portraits are matched with a short biography and collected in a zine, I picked up this one a number of years ago.
Black History Month Daily Drawing Zine by Avy Jetter (2018)
I had this James Baldwin drawing on a pin I kept on my brown corduroy jacket but some young filmmakers borrowed my jacket for their wardrobe and lost it (the pin, not the jacket). I need to get a replacement.
James Baldwin
I love pen and ink crosshatching drawings and Avy gets some really good tones in her work.
Marsha P. JohnsonTupac Amaru Shakur
The zine provides a good cross-section of historic and modern figures and seeing that this project has been running for seven years (or longer?), there’s always something new to learn. Here’s one of my favorites from this year:
You can see process videos on Avy’s YouTube. Certain portraits are available to buy from her Etsy.
Reading and enjoying this book, keep thinking it would make a terrific MG illustrated NF project. It’s already kind of YA.
Crazy as Hell (2023)
Part of what feeds this feeling is that many biographies in the book (the biographies are sectioned into chapters of people who are “crazy as hell”, The Runaway, The Rebel, The Inmate, The Funky, The Imaginary and the Visionary) end with an enticing call for the reader to further their research. Harriet Tubman’s bio ends with “She’s the stuff of legends. Look her up.” Gabriel Prosser’s ends with “Google Gabriel Prosser to get more details on who betrayed him.”
There’s a conversational (and maybe conspiratorial?) tone in these prompts. I like that the author trusts the reader as a curator of this history and even allows the joy of discovery to whoever’s bold enough to further their research. On top of that, I kept thinking about the Dead Internet theory, how AI flood the web with garbage, how Google is basically an online marketplace, and (this one is actually actively raising my blood pressure) how the current administration is wiping information off government websites and how quickly government workers have rolled over and complied with bad actors. Cowardly as hell.
Anyway, just something I’m thinking about as I continue posting on the blog.
This zine is so good. I’ll let the reviews on the Silver Sprocket website (where you can and should buy the zine) do the talking but I’ll add that the punchline ending is heartbreakingly good. Absolute perfection.
*edited ’cause this is a mostly #kidlit site, although there’s only two swears in the whole thing
On the subject of who’s telling whose stories… not long after finding the BLACK MOTHER GOOSE BOOK, I found this Black Archie-looking comic.
The art was spot on so I thought it might be an Archie spinoff (Archie had a Black character, Chuck, maybe Fast Willie was Chuck’s cousin) but it’s a separate publisher completely. The publisher was Bertram A. Fitzgerald, who published the Golden Legacy comics, a series of comic book retellings of historical Black figures. You can see those advertised in Fast Willie here:
Fast Willie itself was a fairly typical teen comic, made up of a ten-pager story and some single page gag comics. Just imagine Archie but make Archie and Jughead Black and make Pops Puerto Rican.
The comic was supposedly written by the publisher, Bertram A. Fitzgerald, but I suspect the artist, Gus LeMoine (who also drew for Archie), had a strong hand in the writing. One pagers like this suggests that to me.
But I could be wrong. There isn’t much online about the making of this comic. And for a time, Gus LeMoine’s identity was even a subject of debate. At any rate, Fast Willie Jackson didn’t resonate with comic readers, Black or white, and the adventures of Mocity’s favorite son only lasted for seven issues.
