Depressing, horrific, post-modern kids books have been in fashion for years. Here's one (above) called "Spooky ABC" by Eve Merriam, illustrations by Lane Smith. This one happens to be about Halloween but there were plenty more in the same eerie style about more conventional things. All the time I was scanning these pictures I was trying to recollect where I'd seen this style before and it finally came to me: in "Silent Hill," the horror video game about pervasive evil and dismemberment. 
These ABC pictures are by Lane Smith, two-time winner of the New York Times Best Illustrated Book award. The book is one of the big, expensive ones. Can't publishers find a way to bring the prices down?
This green picture of the house is also by Lane Smith. So far as I can guess it appears to show a bunch of convict slave zombies carrying the kid and his house to Hell, or perhaps to outer space.
The gigantic, yellow, expensive blob of a kid is, believe it or not, from a story Dr. Seuss wrote in the 1970s. Why do minimalist books cost so much?
When my kids were young I couldn't get them to read most of their illustrated books. They found my bound copies of Carl Barks' Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge books and poured over them, even before they knew how to read.
41 comments:
I don't know the 'Silent Hill' game, but The 'Spooky ABC' image reminds me of the Oogie-Boogie Man's assistants (Shock and Lock?) in 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' - the same elongated face with the eyes high up. A similar horror theme, too.
Uncle Eddie, why are childrens books infinitely more successful than comics?
I'm looking forward to the day when I can crack open my Disney comic reprints (Gladstones from the 80s) for my daughter! She's already a public library enthusiast.
Q: Have you ever been tempted to go down the "childrens' book" path, Eddie?
What an awesome role model for kids that yellow thing is.
A smeary, bland, jaundiced, bloated mutant.
I learned to read before I was in preschool and I loved my books. But my preferences were different because I preferred less fictional books and more nature science. It was much later that I began to take more interest in real "children's" books and really took to Baum's Oz series. Now those there were some great reads!
All books cost quite a bit now--but then, so does all publishing(which is also hugely downsized from Dr. Seuss' day). Not making excuses for the markups, but there you are--inflation. Generally a PB costs 15.95 or so, which frankly seems fair for a new HB given the relative costs of printing etc. these days..PBs, while usually more modest in scope, cost much less--I've neve seen one go for that much. And the older reprint of such as Bill Peet's and the "I Can Read!" series are still very low-priced, deliberately. In those cases they make a steady profit from steady sales; a new hardcover must generally sell well immediately in it's first run, or it goes out of print.
Lane Smith's books are available in libraries for free, as you've found, though, along with most others, if not all, new picturebooks and others.
Lane's a super-nice guy and a talented painter, btw, who worked on at least one finished animated film("James and the Giant Peach"), and had several others in development. He was generous with his time and techniques of painting, which are fascinating. It's not shown to its best advantage in the "yellow" example you've posed...are you familiar with his other work much? Somewhere I believe I have a feature on his studio which I'll bet you'd get a kick out of seeing.
Really!
Okay, whoops: my first "PB" in my post below stands for "Picturebook"--my second meant "paperback"--D'OH!. And damn. Oh well...
Hey--how did you wind up liking "Are You My Mother?" by Eastman?
That was among the picturebooks I went nuts for as a pre-reader and early reader and even grown up I still love it...and I think all kids, everywhere, are drawn to much "older" skewed books if they have any design elements or pictures that are attractive, like the Barks stuff or in my case, Lewis Carroll, who incited me to really figure out how to read the best I could from an early age just because of the Tenniel drawings.
I don't see the correlation between that nasty looking book and silent hill besides the spooky element considering silent hill is about rape, murder, and suicide haha.
Publishers seem to think these big minimal sketchy-looking books are what children like- but I think any kid would prefer a well-drawn intricately rendered masterpiece over this crap. At school we made some children's books and the way we got graded was if kids liked them. And of course the kids loved the more cartoony and cinematic ones over the crappy new age art.
"I think a lot of the new, minimalist looking art in kids' books draws a lot of inspiration from Quentin Blake's illustrations for Roald Dahl's books. It seems similar to me, anyway, and as a kid I loved those pictures. "
Well for me I was a little slow at learning to read- not until I was in the second grade, so the image had to entice me without knowing what it said beneath.
Alec: With the exception of the Barks book I really don't like the kids books I posted here. They're depressing!
You can't get a sense of it when the pictures are reduced as drastically as they are here. When you see them large you see the minimalist textures are reminiscent of sandy dirt, dead animal and insect parts, decaying weed fragments and the like, the kind of thing Clive Barker (author of "Hellraiser") would have come up with.
The appropriate music to accompany graphics like this would be dragging chains, muffled screams and cries, creaking doors, etc.
I have no idea why adults would try so hard to depress little kids. Kids are like fuzzy little chicks fresh out of the egg shell and the only way these illustrators can think to entertain them is to show them pictures of Auschwitz.
I liked some of the graphics in "Nightmare before Christmas." The Post-Modern influence is there but the artists managed to make the best parts of it funny.
What? That yellow thing is supposed to be a kid?
Oh...wait. There it is.
The flip side is, there has been a recent resurgence in the publication of "Golden Books", both reprints of classic titles that have not been available for forty years, and a marked reintroduction and emulation of that style.
Even Dave McKean doesn't paint quite like Dave McKean as much. Although he could typify the style you are railing against, which is probably due to the way ART is taught as much as anything.
In the past forty years, If you 'painted', and went for an MFA, you were defacto, if you expected to pass, led through the post modern abstract expressionism school the galleries could fob off on someone with money to burn. If you took those same 'skills' to the illustration market, well you see what happened.
Some Hardback picturebooks never make it to paper, as their main audience is teachers and libraries, who hold the book in front of a crowd of rug rats. At that distance, it doesn't matter if it looks like a close up of the corner of the cat box.
Beyond that, the market just squeaks in right under 5 bucks to start. Costs too much in payroll to distribute, handle and stock, any thing cheaper. The 12 cent comic hasn't been around for a long time.
That is why 'books' are more successful than comics.
One market that has not been led by the adult making the purchases, has oddly enough, been Manga. Kids get into it via Video Games, and TV anime, and word of mouth. And the Japanese Culture produces much more of it, because adults are not afraid of it, as cookie cutter as it sometime may be.
Pop some Barks collections into that format, see how it flies.
Eddie, I think you meant to say that your kids "pored" over the Disney books. It's never a good idea to pour anyting over a comic book.
There's a mid-70's new age dictum that serious art can't be funny.
Eddie,
What would you like to see in children's books? Can you give an example of any books your kids really loved or what they would possibly like to see?
John a: "Pored!!??" I never knew that spelling word as a verb til you just mentioned it! And it sounds identical to "poured!" English is an amazing language. It has so many quirks that you're forced to spend your whole life learning it. Anyway, thanks for the correction.
Jenny: I got "Are You My Mother?" I guess its something you had to have to have read as a kid to appreciate. It's pretty sparce. Even in a small format most of the page was blank, white space. Would it have killed Eastman to put in a background or two?
I saw another Eastman book about dogs that I liked better. The dogs looked a lot like the photo of your own dog that you put up on your blog. I'm not usually attracted to pet pictures but I have to admit that was a pretty appealing pose.
I'm not suprised to hear that Lane Smith is a nice guy. If he can sell something like "Spooky ABC" to a publisher then he must have some amazing social skills.
The work he did on the Peach movie was full of melancholy (an odd emotion to inject into a kids film) but it was definitely more fun to look at than his Clive Barker-type kids books.
I can't believe there isn't a way to bring down book costs. They told the guy who started Taschen art books that there was no way to do it cheap. Similar advice was given to the people at Naxos (the CD company). What about the people who made the paperback revolution in the 50s and 60s?
The first thing book companies need to do is put out product that kids actually want to read. When I was a kid there were lots of kids in the kids section of the book store. Some of them threw tantrums when they couldn't get the book they wanted. Now the kids book section is almost empty and parents have to drag their kids into it. It's not hard to figure out the reason why. What kid is going to throw a tantrum if he can't get a horrifying, artsy, emotionally arid, Post-Modern picture book?
"the minimalist textures are reminiscent of sandy dirt, dead animal and insect parts, decaying weed fragments and the like"
If I remember correctly, this is a fair description of precisely what kids love--sandy dirt? I'm there, baby! And I'm not being in the least sarcastic. Weeds? Insect parts?
Kids love love love dark, organic, what we'd sometimes call "gross" material--and insects? They collect bugs, for pete's sake!
Anyway, I really must stand up for Lane Smith as something other than an insane child-hater here[jk]. He's not a personal friend, but his books do sell for a reason. Presumably because kids like them and ask their parents to buy them and read them to them. That said, obviously kids' tastes vary just as much as adults' tastes do...there's no ONE appealling "right", merry look for children. I knew kids who hated Dr. Seuss' drawings. I don't think they had poor taste(I think Seuss is brilliant), they simply were drawn to different stuff, color-wise and shape-wise. it takes all kinds, even at the infink stage. : )
Do you know whose stuff I think would horrify kids? Wolverton. Then again, he wasn't drawing for kids, was he? And I would guess Smith is drawing/painting for himself--the kid in himself. He's said as much. Again--takes all kinds.
Jenny: You're thinking of nice, friendly dirt. I like that kind of dirt too. The Lane Smith dirt I was referring to is unfriendly dirt: gasoline, urine and liter-saturated dirt like you find in back of squalid,urban gas stations. In other words, Clive Barker dirt. Sorry for the lurid description.
You're still unconvinced, I can tell. If and when I learn how to use PhotoBucket I'll scan in some of Lane's textures and lettering at a size big enough so you'll be able to see what I'm talking about. A picture's worth a thousand words.
Craig, Derelict: Good idea for a post! I'd rather put up the books that I liked and couldn't force my stubborn kids to read, but if you insist then I'll put up their favorites.
I am interested in doing kids books but i didn't get a single bite when I mailed out submissions a few yers ago. I'll try again soon.
The first comic book I got before I learned how to read was a Comics & Stories issue with a Barks story in it. I honestly forget which story it was, but I just know I've been disappointed when I've seen a Donald comic NOT drawn by Barks ever since!
- Thad
Eddie,
I'm really glad that your kids are enjoying your Barks library set. I've managed to gather five sets of the library and about 3 long boxes of Disney books for my kids.
I still love reading them, and I learned an awful lot about composition and design from the Barks covers. There's an article in one of the sets that talks about how he'd lay them out, and it's really fascinating.
Jasper and the Watermelons by George Pal and many of the Golden Books have it all over the modern kiddie book offerings in terms of illustrations.
I never could hack the grim and drab graphics growing up in the 70s and 80s. I gravitated to bright and simple (but clear!) drawings like Harvey comic book covers.
A few years ago, my friend (ornithologist Karla Kinstler) and I were trying to get a children's book published about the life of an owl. The characters were drawn as fully constructed cartoon characters. (As a side note, drawing owls as expressive cartoon figures is a unique challenge...beaks do not convey emotions very well. Therefore I was limited to eye and body postures.) Unfortunately the book was never published. I would hate to resort to drawing the natural world with a postmodern twist. Postmodern art seems better suited to fantasy/fairy tales than stories involving natural history.
Hey Eddie!,
If you have some spare time on your hands and feel like giving a poor schlub some kindness (or harshness) come by my blog and tell me whats right or wrong.
Crumpled: You need to get the Preston Blair book!
Eddie Fitzgerald said...
The work he did on the Peach movie was full of melancholy (an odd emotion to inject into a kids film) but it was definitely more fun to look at than his Clive Barker-type kids books.
The book the movie is based on, by Roald Dalh, is melancholy to begin with. (English children must be made of sterner stuff, what with their stiff upper lips and all.) And you know what? THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT! Hell, the original Grimms fairy tales were pretty horrific to begin with.
Does every children's book have to be sweetness and light? Kids like other emotions, too. They like to be scared sometimes.
Lane Smith is a great illustrator. Look at his best work which is "The Stinky Cheese Man". And he can be funny, too. Read "The Happy Hockey Family". It's filled with sarcastic humor, as if MAD magazine had made a children's book (which I think is good for kids). It's also illustrated in a simple two-toned color process on newsprint paper, to give it an old fashioned look. No dark and grimy textures for you there, Mr. Fitzgerald.
It's a halloween book, so I guess it's okay to be scary. I can't quite understand the ABC's part, as most kids into ABC's want to be Spongebob or a princess for halloween. Seems confused about its target market. You can get this book cheap enough used online. I believe heavily in the concept of waiting until other people are done with something. Does not extend to restaurant food.
...drawing owls as expressive cartoon figures is a unique challenge...beaks do not convey emotions very well.
Leave us not forget Scribner's Daffy Duck. And you gotta see what JohnK does with the angry duck in ALTRUISTS. He does things to a beak nobody has ever thought of. Take THAT, Carl Barks.
I liked Stinky Cheese Man.
dear Unca Eddie,
please tell us what other kinds of dirt there are, and which are edible.
I have a brand new kiddie book. Its called “Heather has two yellow minimalist blobs for daddies”.
(it’s not very tasty, though)
Love,
deprived child
Buddy, don't compare the duck in "Altruists" to Barks ducks. Those are two completely different mediums and two completely different artists trying to accomplish two completely different things.
Eddie, I just found my copy of "Stinky Cheese Man" that I had as a kid. I was always repulsed by it, and I got it when I was like 7, so there's some 'first-hand knowledge' for you.
- Thad
Leave us not forget Scribner's Daffy Duck. And you gotta see what JohnK does with the angry duck in ALTRUISTS. He does things to a beak nobody has ever thought of.
Your comment is duly acknowledged and greatly appreciated. Some of the most expressive characters in the cartoon kingdom are ducks, such as Daffy Duck, Donald Duck, Howard the Duck and Duckman. However, bills are not very useful for emotions because 1) bills have limited mobility, 2) bills do not have as many facial muscles (as compared to primates), 3) bills do not have teeth (except mergansers have saw-edged mandibles). This realism becomes more of an issue with education material.
Cartoonists do have artistic license. However, I think more flavor and opportunity arises if the cartoons derive humor from attributes of the characters drawn. For example, insects have many intricate parts to their mouths...it must be a trial just to eat a meal.
THE ALTRUISTS was one of the greatest episodes from the Ren & Stimpy 'Lost Episodes' DVD. And I did enjoy the duckbill sequences from this episode (even when the duck had teeth).
I just had a belated thought on this subject.
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment here...
Mr. Fitzgerald, didn't you work on cartoons that were scary and grimy and not really for children? As in the original Spumco Ren & Stimpy? Plenty of episodes dealt with gross, unpleasant subjects, not to mention scenes of violent psychotic episodes of a certain chihuahua?
Weren't those odd subjects to inject into a kid's cartoon? What about the hint that Mr. Horse was a serial killer in "Rubber Nipple Salesmen"? And didn't Ren and Stimpy appear to live in a world filled with "gasoline, urine and liter-saturated dirt like you find in back of squalid,urban gas stations"?
Or perhaps you think detailed paintings of mucus is suitable in a children's cartoon?
Those are two completely different mediums and two completely different artists trying to accomplish two completely different things.
I know. Barks was being more or less visually true to Disney. He excelled at it. To me that's boring. I know I have no right to say it publicly, but I suck. I love your site. Thanks.
Your comment is duly acknowledged and greatly appreciated. Some of the most expressive characters in the cartoon kingdom are ducks
I realized after posting that a bill is not exactly a beak, but perhaps there are still some lessons there.
Kids love Wolverton.
In fact, kids like detail. Something that can draw them in.
As long as the detail does not interfere with clear storytelling.
They also appreciate stylized drawing. They do generally, however, like the drawings to be better than those they can do themselves.
But Kids aren't buying the books. Parents are. The parents don't mind something that looks like the scribble that was taped to the fridge before junior went to kindergarten. although the kid might think, hey,that dude can't draw.
Jorge: My words exactly!
The visual style of the show, like the best children's books, was aesthetically pleasing. It was beautiful ugliness.
I agree, Jorge. I enjoyed the show and the drawing style. However, some viewers were put off by Ren & Stimpy. They found it to be dark and scary. I just see a similarity to the way some view Lane Smith's illustrations.
Eddie even implied that Smith's illustrations were akin to video games about killing. Since Mr. Fitzgerald worked on a show aimed at children that contained some adult themes, some people might find that to be hypocritical. (I'm don't think he is, since he's really only talking about style not content, but you can see how it could be viewed that way.)
But Kids aren't buying the books. Parents are.
Exactly.
Children's book publishers have essentially two customers: parents and librarians. Kids do not walk into the local Books & Notbooks and drool over those gigantic, age-nebulous picture books.
No, they drool over the plush Curious George (from that movie they liked). Then the parent spots the Curious George books and buys them immediately because they bring back so many wonderful memories of when they first read them. Brilliant, really.
I can't figure what the hell librarians are doing nowadays, gushing over all the shitty, plotless kids' books. The reviews sound as though they were all written by Peter Travers (that "4 stars!" idiot at Rolling Stone). Who kidnapped our exacting schoolmarms and replaced them with these dopes?
I get an "emperor's new clothes" vibe off of all this; editors using "fine" artists--you know, the real kind, not like us sellouts--to pitch to the adults who will make or break the title's success. It's fine art, so it must be better! And you, sophisticated librarian, surely know good art when it's jammed down your craw! Love the stonewashed denim schmatte, btw.
I don't think all fine art picture books have been failures, but illustrators and cartoonists are not simply making pictures: they are storytelling. They are storytellers by nature. They can't help it. Those word balloons are a vital outlet.
I've learned that if I talk about ideas I'm working on, or describe a plot, a character--most anything--in a current project with someone, I lose the desire to go ahead with the project. My desire to tell the story has been satisfied. It's the telling, the need to tell, that motivates me to work. That's why I'm an illustrator, not a fine artist. I am compelled, for better or worse, to tell stories, and if I let them slip out too early, even small parts of them, my compulsion to tell them evaporates. It's almost a physical sense of relief, like an escape hatch suddenly appeared on my head and out came a bolus of crushed lightbulbs.
I have always disliked Lane Smith's children's illustrations. He is very talented, and his editorial illustrations were great--he should stay with those. He's all about "style". He's not a storyteller, from what I've seen of his work. The writing (his and that of his co-authors) is uncomfortably mannered and self-aware, like bad poetry with inexplicably random line breaks and indents and midsentence capital Letters for no Reason.
Mark Teague never fails to disappoint me, promising so much on the cover and not delivering the goods. His style (there's that word again) is appealing and friendly, but so much more could have been done with the idea that I'm pretty grumpy on page 32.
Of course, we can safely assume he made numerous compromises in his effort to get the thing published. Maybe the art director insisted on those hokey perspectives and the editor cut his story off at the knees. (I'm in complete agreement with you on the p.o.v crap. That's another Chris Van Allsburg crime, his work being a perfect example of marketing to adults instead of kids.)
I found a fabulous book in the trash the other day, the cover of which I'll post, titled How To Draw Cartoons Successfully, by Carl Anderson, creator of "Henry". You remember Henry, don't you? The baldheaded, mute in the funnies? That one that always looked kind of fun but when you read it you found out that it sucked? Yeah, that one. This book is very much like Preston Blair's book in its approach, so it's actually sort of helpful, to beginners anyway. It was published in 1935, so the writing's completely ridiculous, but it's also part of the book's charm.
Other titles available from the same publisher include The Hygiene of Marriage.
FYI, it's the Caldicott Medal for illustrators; the Newbery is for writing.
Oh, and one more thing:
You are not my uncle! You are a snort!
I'm not sure you give kids enough credit. I liked books like "Spooky ABC" as a kid. Kids aren't THAT easy to scare, and they like sad or creepy or weird stories and pictures as much as grown-ups do. Heck, if you want scary illustrations, look at the "Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark" series--that's Silent Hill for you. Yet those books have been in print for years.
The examples you've shown are definitely not by a no-talent, and they're better than the bland art (some of it realistic or even cartoon!) that you see in many kids' books. I don't like seeing it called "no better than kids' scribbles" when in fact few adults could replicate that artwork.
I guess it kind of rubs me the wrong way because it's like you (and some of the commenters) are saying that kids' books must have a certain kind of art, otherwise it's garbage. It's like how some people say that modern art is garbage and why can't people just paint detailed pictures of landscapes instead. Or that comics and cartoons are garbage because they're not realistic, therefore aren't "art" at all! I've heard that one before, and it makes me mad every time.
Like cartoons, abstract art is grossly underappreciated. Anyone can copy a Garfield drawing or make some paint wiggles on a canvas, but not everyone can draw a character with emotion and movement or paint an abstract piece that uses color, space, rhythm, and other elements to manipulate the viewer viscerally. You might dislike abstract art, but it's not trash just because you don't like it.
Kris: There's room for lots of types of books in the kids genre. In spite of the fact that I used the word "horrific" I have nothing against scarey literature, it's depressing lit that puzzles me. Why would adults try to depress children? What's the point? And why are there no comics in the kids section?
I just saw the wonderful movie "Miss Potter", and it occurred to me that if the movie plot in any way resembles her real life, (and apparently she had a repressed childhood), maybe her fiancee Mr Warne did not just conveniently die of a cough during her parentally enforced pre-nuptial vist to the Lake District, but was the victim of a contract arranged by ...guess who! The year must have been about 1905. Did anyone any one else make that conclusion? Can we get him dug up for forensic tests?
the flesicher cartoons were creapy
and frighting (maybe not post modern) and a newsprint comic only cost 2.50 but there are few of them
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