Black and White by David Macaulay

Innovative Design into the 21st Century

Article 17

by Lyn Lacy                     5300 words

    (No, dear reader, not that “black and white.” Monochromatic picture books are discussed in Article 13, which was a lot of fun to write. This book titled Black and White (1990) actually has only one double page spread illustrated without color by David Macaulay. The title refers to a riddle “What’s black and white and read all over?” Answer: newspapers, which are important in this story.) 

    Regarding innovative page and book design, children have not always been accustomed to a variety of design in their books. Ease of printing in the 19th century meant that text was reserved for one page, and an illustration—if one were included—was printed on its own page. See Article 13 for discussion of Wanda Gág (1893-1946), who has been credited for creating the first American picture book with illustrations that flowed for the first time from left to right pages in the classic 1929 Newbery Honor Book, Millions of Cats (1928). Her brother’s hand-lettered text was additionally shaped around her illustrations. Almost two decades later, Virginia Lee Burton (1909-1968) was awarded the 1943 Caldecott Medal for her own classic, The Little House (1942), also with text shaped around double page illustrations, this time in color.

    In the early 1960s, a young illustrator in Brooklyn decided he would design a book that looked even more unusual than what had come before, Few people realized over fifty years ago what a groundbreaker Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) would be. 

    Once again, Sendak brought new ideas to story and illustrations for the picture book form. Three previous blog articles have discussed ways in which he influenced the genre. Article 4 discussed his honesty about children’s behavior. Max in Wild Things and Ezra Jack Keats’ Peter in The Snowy Day (1962) could not have been more different, but for the first time Keats introduced a little black boy as main character and the next year Sendak portrayed a naughty little white boy as protagonist. Next, in Article 14 Sendak is noted to have startled the public with his monsters, and years passed before critics agreed with him that Max was having the time of his life with the overgrown, friendly furrballs. And in Article 16 the author/illustrator of Wild Things is shown to have ignored traditional magic portals as entrance into another world by having Max transport himself using only his rebellious imagination after being put in a time out.

    Wild Things’ size and shape of illustrations changed with each turn of the page, and the audience watched the story unfold as on a stage with opening and closing curtains of white space. Large or small scenes for bedroom, forest, ocean and wild place moved the story along or stopped it on its mark. Sometimes illustrations did not need any words at all, as in the famous “wild rumpus” sequence of three double-page illustrations and at the end, words did not need an illustration. Sendak was a stage manager regulating responses to the various acts in his play. 

    His design was also unique in that he employed the gutter in his double page spreads. Instead of ignoring or avoiding the invisible vertical line where the book is bound, as most illustrators had done before him, he emphasized the gutter in ingenious ways. First, posed at this strong vertical line is a tree, then a sea dragon and later another tree as dramatic points of interest when the right page illustrations begin to invade the left pages of text.

    This variety, ingenuity and playfulness in page design were unusual in 1963. As stated in the introduction for Sendak at the 2003 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, “He all at once revolutionized the entire picture-book narrative… (and) changed the entire landscape of the modern picture-book - thematically, aesthetically and psychologically.” Margalit Fox in The New York Times (8 May 2012) saluted Sendak as "the most important children's book artist of the 20th century." John Cech has written, “Sendak’s willingness to experiment with varied subjects and stylistic modes contributes to the uniquely defining presence that his work has among contemporary children’s books. In fact, it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine children’s literature today without his works and the children who inhabit them.” (Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak, 1995, p. 3).

    Publishing improvements during the mid-twentieth century allowed creators of picture books more freedom to imagine an increasingly wide variety of book and page designs. The picture book was beginning to be recognized as having unique canvases to play with – horizontal or vertical or square pages, single page illustrations or double page spreads, front and back covers advertising what is inside, endpapers that can set a mood, front matter where the story itself may sometimes begin and a body of content requiring the wedding of text and illustration. 

    The art and publishing worlds of the second half of the 20th century were fertile ground for new ideas, and Sendak’s contemporaries were also playing with picture book design. Marvin Bileck (1920-2005) in the 1965 Caldecott Honor Book, Rain Makes Applesauce (1964), combined silliness of poetic text by Julian Scheer with fanciful illustrations that danced in and around the words. In Thirteen (1975), with words and pictures by Remy Charlip (1929-2012) and Jerry Joyner, thirteen little vignettes were illustrated on double page spreads, each one changing to tell its own story as pages are turned. Eric Carle (1929-) added to his brilliant collages such playful design features as holes eaten through all the pages for The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969), chirping in The Very Quiet Cricket (1990) and twinkling lights for The Very Lonely Firefly (1995). 

    The 1976 Caldecott Medalist, Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears (1975), illustrated by Leo Dillon (1933-2012) and Diane Dillon (1933-), incorporated double, continuous and split visual narratives on the same pages. In the topsy-turvy or upside-down books, Reflections (1987) and Round Trip (1990) by Ann Jonas (1932-2013), the books themselves were reversed for the second half of the story. The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (1984) by Chris Van Allsburg, had fourteen single-page illustrations, each with a suggestive title and provocative caption on the opposite page that encouraged readers to come up with the stories themselves. In Ed Young’s Lon Po Po (1989) the ominous presence of a wolf showed up in vertical panels of landscape, in a blanket, in shadows and in a tree, so that nothing was as it seemed.     

    In 1990 a well-known, award-winning illustrator (1979 Motel of the Mysteries above) created another new kind of picture book. Black and White by David Macaulay (1946-) shocked the public in much the same ways that Where the Wild Things Are had done thirty years before, this time with a nonlinear textual and visual narrative. Macaulay was  the author/illustrator of over a dozen books about architecture, design and the ways things worked, and he now turned his meticulous eye for detail and sense of humor to a completely new kind of mind-boggling work of fiction. 

    In his 1991 Caldecott Medal winner, he asked much of the audience with a storytelling puzzle of four stories, each with its own space blocked out on double page spreads and rendered in its own artistic style—“Seeing Things” (a boy on a train), “Problem Parents” (a family), “A Waiting Game” (commuters with newspapers), “Udder Chaos” (some cows that had their introduction in Macaulay’s 1987 picture book, Why The Chicken Crossed the Road, which also featured Desperate Dan, who had escaped from a train that was taking him to jail, so watch for him to loosely tie the four stories together).

    The unique design of intertwining stories on each spread annoyed and outraged many adults who tried to read it aloud to a young picture book audience. The book was far too sophisticated and challenging for none but the most discerning group of young people. If Sendak’s book was likened to watching a stage play unfold page by page, then Macaulay’s was like watching four television channels simultaneously. After many years of sharing this book with youngsters, here was a hint for the beginning: starting with the cows’ story, preface with “meanwhile” before reading the other three. The strategy helped at the onset even though it soon fell apart. The stories themselves may have appeared continuous as pages are turned, but visuals intersected at various pages in the book, and in case an audience thought it had figured out the entire plot, an illustration on the last page suggested another way to interpret it.   

    In his profound 1991 Caldecott Acceptance Speech, Macaulay said exactly that—“It all depends on how you look at it.” He also said, “The subject of the book is the book,” “It is designed to be viewed in its entirety, its surface read all over,” and “We don’t have to think in straight lines to make sense.” He issued a clarion call for a new mindset about visual literacy headed into the 21st century and explained four crucial experiences that made the book valuable for children—visual perception, visual-verbal connections, holistic thinking and risk taking. Answering his call were illustrator Lane Smith (1959-) and author Jon Scieszka, with The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (1992) and The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! (1996), both fractured fairy tales with unconventional pages of twisted points of view and an eclectic mixture of text and pictures. 

    All these inventive book makers led the design revolution into the 21st century, when illustrators below continued to play with the picture book format, sometimes breaking rules completely with audience participation, filmic or sculptural qualities (however, pop ups and other mechanical/interactive books are a different genre and will be discussed in a future article.) Many thanks for help with several titles reviewed below to fellow enthusiast Travis Jonker of “100 Scope Notes” at School Library Journal for his annual column “Wildest Children’s Books of the Year.” Enticing to think that a 21st century evolution might be handmade illustrations combined with technologies such as three-dimensional printers, immersive images and/or virtual reality. Who knows.

2001 David Wiesner (American, 1956-), Author and Illustrator. The Three Pigs, Clarion Books       

    Wiesner’s significant contributions to 21st century fantasy in picture books can be compared to none other than Sendak. The prescient Wiesner, known internationally for his phenomenal fantasies, had already firmly planted his feet headed toward the 21st century with work he began in the 20the century—including 1989 Honor Book, Free Fall (1988), 1992 Medalist, Tuesday (1991) and 2000 Honor Book, Sector 7 (1999). (His use for panels of all sizes with engaging viewpoints and an abundance of details was well known, as in Tuesday above.)

    His 2002 Caldecott Medalist about The Three Pigs started out formally—the original tale was constrained tightly within white margins—before the illustrations became free-floating as pigs escaped to explore across double page spreads that defied the spaces they were supposed to inhabit. The pigs folded a page into a paper airplane, went exploring other stories, and picked up the Cat and the Fiddle and a mighty Dragon along the way. In this freewheeling visual narrative that turned traditional storytelling on its head, the pigs change appearance according to which story they had slipped into and their thoughts and dialogue were sometimes in speech balloons directed off the page to the audience. Wiesner also received a 2014 Honor Book award for Mr. Wuffles! (2013), released I Got It! in 2018 and Robobaby in 2020. See also Chapter 5 for Flotsam (2006), the author/illustrator’s 2007 Honor Book.

2002 Eric Rohmann (American, 1957-), Author/Illustrator. My Friend Rabbit, Roaring Brook Press

    In his 2003 Caldecott Medalist, Rohmann had outsized proportions for his animals squeezed into the pictures until finally, he turned the book sideways into a double page vertical spread in order to stack them one on top of another. Jacques Duquennoy did the same for board book Little Ghost Party (2013), which was tilted so that thin chains inserted into the ingenious illustrations turned things around to create different motions and moods.

2004 Mo Willems (American, 1968-), Author/Illustrator. Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, Hyperion

    Willems incorporated enhanced digital photographs of street scenes for backgrounds in his 2005 Honor Book, the first of his three Knuffle Bunny books. The author/illustrator wrote about his Brooklyn brownstones and laundromat: “"Each photograph was taken using a shot list that matched preliminary sketches of the layout of the book. The photos are heavily doctored in Photoshop software (in which) sundry air conditioners, garbage cans, street trash and industrial debris were expunged…in addition to changing the photos to their sepia tone.”

    Willems then layered his own comic book art and speech balloons for Trixie and her father into the photographs, often extending outside the field of action onto green margins where text is informally scattered above, below or to the side. He explained: “The sketches were made by hand, then colored and shaded in Photoshop and placed into the photographic collages, also using Photoshop.” The resulting page design was a “melding of hand-drawn ink sketches and photography” that was uniquely suited to this story because portrayal of a toddler’s “boneless” meltdown over a lost toy was, quite honestly, funnier in a cartoon happening to someone else, but the realism of the photos reminded the audience how true to life such an event can be. The illustrations were particularly intriguing when the sketches were actually created to interact with the photography, as in scenes in which the cartoon of Trixie’s dad was rummaging in and around a photographed clothes dryers to find the lost toy.  

    Willems went on to create a 2008 Caldecott Honor Book, Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case Of Mistaken Identity (2007) and Knuffle Bunny Free: An Unexpected Diversion (2010). See also Leonardo, the Terrible Monster (2005) in chapter 5 and Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! (2003) in chapter 6. 

2006 Shaun Tan (Australian, 1974-), Author?Illustrator. The Arrival, Arthur A. Levine

    Tan’s graphic novel for all ages was a fantastic wordless masterpiece that portrayed not only the surreal experiences of one immigrant in a new land but also the terrors he and his fellow immigrants faced in their homelands. The book was in six parts, each telling the back stories of war, unseen monsters, slave masters and robots with incinerating vacuums, interspersed with scenes of friendship, compassion, joy and hope in the new land. The layout was similar to an old photo album and indeed, endpapers had sixty photographs of men, women and children from around the world at the turn of the 20th century. Pages of small episodic illustrations were interspersed with stunning double spreads of landscapes, seascapes, cityscapes, all incorporating symbols and bizarre permutations of a new civilization. Such a brief review does an injustice to the bizarre beauty of the intricacies found in this unique book. 

    The illustrator had explained in his website’s essays about planning for the book’s surreal content: “Removing words, character identity, any precise notion of time or place, and also hovering between realism and the dreamlike softness of drawing…allows the reader to interpret the story in their own way, and at their particular pace or level of understanding…The fact that the book is intended to look like an old photo album, with its simplified layout and sepia-tone naturalism, hopefully adds to this sense of open interpretation.” (excerpted from “Words and Pictures, an Intimate Distance,” ABC Radio National’s Lingua Franca, 2010, and “Strange Migrations,” IBBY Conference Keynote, London, 2012). Tan achieved another black-and-white masterpiece with Cicada (2019). See The Red Tree in Article 4. 

2007 Brian Selznick (American, 1966-), Author/Illustrator. The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Scholastic

    Selznick’s 2008 Medalist was an illustrated novel for children ages 9-14. The book had the size of a novel (6”x8”), the heft of a novel (533 pages), and the length of a novel (26,159 words) with 158 pictures (as stated on page 511). A steampunk stage was set in a 1931 Parisian train station with its steam locomotives and enormous clocks, an automaton, film maker Georges Méliès and his 1902 French adventure film, “A Trip to the Moon,” for the coming-of-age story about an orphaned boy hiding in the station until a young girl and her grandfather offered him an important role to play in history. Viewpoints were askew, from aerial dissolves to closeups of Hugo’s eye, all formally framed by black borders and in the Brief Introduction, the author asked the audience to pretend to watch a movie since indeed, many illustrations in sequence created a cinematic effect.

    An initial wordless sequence of twenty-one double page spreads and eighteen exciting double page spreads toward the end were the only two lengthy displays of illustrations. Because of its visual sequences, the book was chosen by the Caldecott Committee, but it might well have been under consideration by the Newbery Committee instead because of its novel-length text. Hugo Cabret is a genre-defying, boundary-buster of design that was conceived like no other before and simply shatters all contemporary conventions.  

    Selznick had written, “I met Maurice Sendak. His words were simple but powerful: ‘Make the book you want to make’…I wanted to create a novel that read like a movie. I looked to picture books for the answer. Remy Charlip posed for me as Georges Méliès because of his uncanny resemblance to the filmmaker… Even though Hugo Cabret is a book about movies, and it’s told like a movie, the main concern is still the book.” Selznick continued with his unique design in Wonderstruck! (2011), The Marvels (2015) and Kaleidoscope (2021). He created a new design for Baby Monkey, Private Eye (2018) reviewed below.

2008 Don Wood (American, 1945-), Author/Illustrator. Into The Volcano, Blue Sky Press

    A graphic novel for ages 9-14, Wood’s coming-of-age adventure was handsomely drawn in panels of all sizes throughout its 175 pages. The author/illustrator moved the story along quickly with many twists and turns for two boys in danger from the minute they left school. Wood wrote, “Creating a graphic novel has been my obsession since I was very young (I didn't realize it would take four-and-half years.) Into the Volcano was drawn and painted entirely on an Apple computer with digital media, Corel Painter, Adobe Photoshop and the Wacom digital tablet with stylus. In my experience, digital art is not faster. However, it is more flexible.” The art was not the usual manga or comic book style for graphic novels and was definitely a change from Wood’s picture books, such as 1986 Caldecott Honor Book, King Bidgood’s in the Bathtub (1985), created with his wife Audrey Wood. 

2009  Emily Gravett (British, 1973-), Author/Illustrator. The Rabbit Problem, Paper Engineering by Ania Mochlinska, Simon & Schuster

    A pair of rabbits had a pair of kits who grew to have babies of their own and so on and so on until the bunny population (a result of the Fibonacci sequence) exploded in a pop-up at the end. The story was formatted to be looked at lengthwise as a calendar, with die-cuts, watercolor illustrations, hand-lettered scribbles for daily events, and little fold-out novelties (invitations, a carrot recipe, a baby rabbit book with tiny ultrasound of the twins) glued to pages for each month. Gravett wrote, “I produce my works by drawing different elements of each page on paper, then scanning it into my computer and assembling the finished page in Adobe Photoshop. This way I can control the page design, and keep it all looking fairly fluid.” 

2012 Adam Rex(American, n.d.), Illustrator. Chloe and the Lion, written by Mac Barnett, Little Brown 

A picture book that may mark the first time an author tried to fill in for the illustrator. So while the book itself was in progress, the two creators argued over the direction it should take, and things did not go very well. Equally intriguing was Corinna Luyken’s The Book of Mistakes (2017) in which her artistic imperfections were noted in the text and turned into something else, so the story took off into new directions. 

2012 Sonja Wimmer (German, n.d.), Author/Illustrator. Jon Brokenbrow, Translator. The Word Collector, Madrid: Cuento de Luz

    Luna was a young girl who lived in the sky, where she collected beautiful, friendly, delicious, magnificent words that floated up to her from the world. Her words were personified by being whimsically placed around the pages, floating and flying in and around images so that they glowed with a power all their own. When people stopped sending their words up to her, Luna descended to leave words of love and hope and when she was finished, people again shared words with her and with each other. Brokenbrow also translated Wimmer’s The Magic Hat Shop (2016).

2013 Øyvind Torseter (Norwegian, n..d.), Author/Illustrator. The Hole, Enchanted Lion Books 

    Eric Carle made die cuts an intriguing way to tell a story, and Torseter placed a little hole running through his book that moved into and out of the story. Another hole in Look! (2015, Owl Kids Books) by Édouard Manceau invited the audience to look at the world with fresh eyes.

 2014 Matthias Picard (n.d.), Author/Illustrator. Jim Curious: A Voyage to the Heart of the Sea, Abrams

    A boy’s wordless underwater adventure in a large picture book/graphic novel had incredible 3-dimensional detail in illustrations. In Leo Geo (2012) author/illustrator Jon Chad created a factual, similarly fantastic visual journey to the center of the earth and back. Wonderfully bold in design, the long, skinny size of the book mimics the tunnel Leo took into the depths.

2014 Cybèle Young (Canadian, 1972-), Author/Illustrator. Out the Window, Groundwood Books 

    The simple concept of the page turn was cleverly transformed when Young designed the first half of the story around the main character’s attempts to see his bouncing ball fly out the window and, once the book was flipped over topsy-turvy style, the second half revealed a crazy parade of machines and hybrid creatures. In Some Things I’ve Lost (2015, Groundwood Books), Young designed everyday objects that morphed into photographs of meticulously sculpted paper crafting on fanfolds that extended into horizontal panoramas of what appeared to be fantastic underwater sea creatures.

2016 Richard Byrne (American. n.d.), Author/Illustrator. This  Book Is Out of Control! Henry Holt 

    A remote for a new toy proceeded to control other things on the page until the audience helped Ben and Bella put everything right again. A dog in Byrne’s previous picture book, We’re In the Wrong Book! (2015) likewise bumped the two children from a potato sack race into other books they must travel before they got home again. Byrne also created This Book Just Ate My Dog (2014) and This Book Just Stole My Cat (2019).

2016 Molly Idle (American, n.d.), Illustrator. Flora and the Peacocks, Chronicle Books

    As the third in her series of Flora and Her Feathered Friends, Idle’s wordless plot this time was about jealousy when three friends were involved. To add implied motion to her two-dimensional illustrations, Idle incorporated flaps to lift that reveal other poses underneath. When a flap was lifted quickly up and down—similar to the way a flip book works—the pictures above and below simulated movement, animating the scene and making the lift-the-flap feature more than a mechanical but rather a fine addition to a story about dancing. Idle ended the book with a panorama as pages were flipped back in a gatefold to reveal the resolution to the three friends’ dilemma.

2016 Jung Jin-Ho (South Korean-American, n.d.), Author/Illustrator. Look Up! Holiday House

Just as Macaulay’s Rome Antics (1997) was a bird’s viewpoint of the famous city, this picture book was an experience from a worm’s eye perspective of the world. A little girl looked up from a wheelchair as she sat on her balcony, creating a dramatic, unexpected visual experience upward for the audience. A similar idea of changing perspectives is found in The Blanket Where Violet Sits (2022, Candlewick) by Allan Wolf, illustrated in pencil and digitally by Lauren Tobia.

 2016 Jean Julien (French, 1983-), Author/Illustrator. This Is Not a Book, Phaidon

    In a transformative tour-de-force of visual literacy, Julien created each turn of the page into a new metamorphosis. A double page spread was a pretend piano keyboard, or turn the book sideways and the bottom page was a laptop keyboard with the computer’s monitor on the top.

2017 Brian Biggs (American, 1968-), Illustrator. Noisy Night, written by Mac Barnett, Roaring Brook Press

    A little boy heard sounds coming from the apartment above his bedroom, which were shown on the next page to come from an opera singer who, in turn, fretted about sounds coming from above his head, and so on for characters in subsequent apartments higher and higher. The split-level illustrations ingeniously showed across the top of each page just enough of each apartment above to hint who the occupant might be.

 2018 Jon Agee (American, 1959-), Author/Illustrator. The Wall in the Middle of the Book, Dial

    Not since Sendak placed a tree, then a sea monster, then another tree conspicuously near the gutter have illustrators like Agee deliberately and so successfully called attention to the gutter as an element in book design. Agee told the story of a young knight who convinced himself that his side of the book (the left page) was safe from a tiger, a rhino and an ogre that populated the other side (the right page) because a red brick wall ran smack down the gutter that separated them. Only when water was rising on the left side did the knight call for help from the right side, where a good guy happened to come to his rescue. Other picture books using the gutter as design element were Don’t Cross the Line! (2016, Gecko Press) by Isabel Minhos Martins, illustrated by Bernardo Carvalho, and This Book Just Ate My Dog (2014, Henry Holt) written and illustrated by Richard Byrne.

 2018  Brian Selznick (American, 1951-), Author/Illustrator. David Serlin, Co-Author. Baby Monkey, Private Eye, Scholastic Press

    This unique blend of picture book, easy reader chapter book and graphic novel was about Baby Monkey as he solved five cases. Each single-page drawing faced a simple sentence in large typeface on the opposite page. In contrast to detailed scenes were uncluttered images of Baby Monkey as he struggled to get on his pants. Alternating busy illustrations with bold, simple ones paced the story, a dramatic storytelling device that Selznick says he learned from his hero, author/illustrator Remy Charlip: “…the very act of turning the pages plays a pivotal role in telling the story. Each turn reveals something new in a way that builds on the image on the  previous page.” 

2019 Simon Bailly (French, n.d.). The Book in the Book in the Book, written by Julien Baer, Holiday House 

    A boy separated from his parents found a book about . . . a boy separated from his parents who found a book about . . . you guessed it, yet another. Topping it off was how the conceit was carried out, with a series of smaller books attached to the pages. The same idea with animal characters was found in Jesse Klausmeier’s Open This Little Book (2013) illustrated by Suzy Lee.

2019 Kevin Cornell (American, n.d.), Illustrator. Chapter Two is Missing! written by John Lieb, Razorbill

An exceptionally witty and inventive book in which the audience participated to help find a chapter that had been stolen, this was a sophisticated approach to the idea of what books are all about. It was a funny whodunit with some of the punctuation off-kilter, a bunch of letter Ms hiding in Chapter 5, and a Chapter 45 that does not even belong to the story. The Book With No Pictures (2014, Rocky Pond Books) by B. J. Novak is equally silly, since everything written on each page must be said aloud by the person reading it.

2019 Grace Lin (Taiwanese-American, 1974-), Author/Illustrator. A Big Bed for Little Snow, Little Brown

    Lin used a snowy-white background for a bedtime story in which a child and his new feather bed appeared to float in the air. Lin’s vibrant gouache paintings of child, mother and bed appeared to jump off the pages—floating without a baseline on the negative space of the background— and Little Snow’s pajamas melded with the feathers bursting from his new bed that turned into snowflakes. Text placement was informal and perfectly shaped to fit within the field of action. A cameo appearance of Peter from Ezra Jack Keats’ 1963 Caldecott Medalist, The Snowy Day (1962) appeared at the window, just as the illustrator’s endpapers for 2019 Caldecott Honor Book, A Big Mooncake for Little Star (2018), were an homage to Robert McCloskey’s 1949 Caldecott Honor Book, Blueberries for Sal (1948), which “sums up the Americana she wanted to be a part of.”

2020 Beatrice Alemagna (Italian, 1973-), Author/Illustrator.  Things That Go Away, Abrams

Alemagna is a superior oil painter with her childlike images. An innovative element of design was the use of vellum pages that cleverly showed the transformations described in the text.

                                                      Ordering Bibliography

Agee, Jon. The Wall in the Middle of the Book, 2018, Dial 

Alemagna, Beatrice. Things That Go Away, 2020, Abrams

Baer, Julien. The Book in the Book in the Book, illustrated by Simon Bailly, 2019, Holiday House 

Barnett, Mac. Chloe and the Lion, illustrated by Adam Rex, 2012, Little Brown  

Barnett, Mac. Noisy Night, illustrated by Brian Biggs, 2017, Roaring Brook Press 

Byrne, Richard. This  Book Is Out of Control! 2016, Henry Holt

Duquennoy, Jacques. Little Ghost Party, 2013, Abrams

Gravett, Emily. The Rabbit Problem, paper engineering by Ania Mochlinska, 2009, Simon & Schuster 

Idle, Molly. Flora and the Peacocks, 2016, Chronicle Books 

Jin-Ho, Jung. Look Up! 2016, Holiday House

Julien, Jean. This Is Not a Book, 2016, Phaidon

Lieb, John. Chapter Two is Missing! illustrated by Kevin Cornell, 2019, Razorbill 

Lin, Grace. A Big Bed for Little Snow, 2019, Little Brown

Macaulay, David. Black and White, 1990, Houghton Mifflin

Picard, Matthias. Jim Curious: A Voyage to the Heart of the Sea, 2014,  Abrams

Selznick, Brian. The Invention of Hugo Cabret, 2007, Scholastic 

Tan, Shaun. The Arrival, 2006, Arthur A. Levine 

Torseter, Øyvind. The Hole, 2013, Enchanted Lion Books 

Wiesner, David. The Three Pigs, 2001, Clarion Books 

Willems, Mo. Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, 2004, Hyperion 

Wimmer, Sonja. The Word Collector, 2012, translator Jon Brokenbrow, Madrid: Cuento de Luz 

Wood, Don. Into The Volcano, 2008, Blue Sky Press

Young, Cybèle. Out the Window, 2014, Groundwood Books 

 

Note: This blog was created by Lyn Lacy to share history and express personal opinions about innovative picture books. Please respect copyrights of the images which are for educational purposes only and are not to be copied for any reason.

 

Jumanji: Picture Book Fantasies into the 21st Century

Jumanji:

Picture Book Fantasies into the 21st Century

Article 16

by Lyn Lacy

                    3500 words

    Children in mid-19th century America were as delighted as their British counterparts by a fantastic story in which a little girl crawled down a rabbit hole to find herself in an incredible wonderland. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is regarded as the first English masterpiece written for young people, one that began the “First Golden Age” of children’s literature. Another classic from England at the time was a didactic moral fable, The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1862) by Rev. Charles Kingsley, about a chimney sweep named Tom who fell into a river where he met a community of babies who lived underwater and was transformed into one himself. 

    These novels were the first known stories about children who left their ordinary environments to enter fantasy worlds. The writers also used the literary device of a portal or gateway (the rabbit hole or the river) for the child going in and out of the fantasy. Other fantasies from England followed the same pattern with their own portals:  Five Children and It (1902) by E. Nesbit; Peter and Wendy (1911) by J. M. Barrie; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) by C. S. Lewis; and James and the Giant Peach (1961) by Roald Dahl. The first American author to write this type of fantasy novel was L. Frank Baum in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), in which the portal was the door to Dorothy’s house opening into Oz. Charlotte’s Web (1952) by E. B. White and illustrated by Garth Williams is also an American classic but about talking animals, a subsection of the fantasy genre that does not rely on portals or even magical worlds.  

    Over half a century after Oz, Maurice Sendak created another American fantasy—not as a novel but as a picture book that is now also considered a masterpiece in children’s literature, not only because of its art but also because of its ideas that were new to the genre. Previously discussed in Article 4 was Sendak’s honesty in Where the Wild Things Are (1963) about a child’s anger, rebelliousness and disobedience, subjects that were unheard of in picture books at the time,. And noted in Article 14 was the public outrage in the 1960s over his monstrous wild beasts that were going to scare children with their terrible roars, teeth, eyes and claws. Now a third Wild Things controversy from that time was that Max’s bedroom was taken over by a weird, menacing forest that some adults thought might haunt children lying in their own beds. 

    Sendak’s forest had a twist on the tradition of a portal—Max had already shut the door to his room. The fantasy world simply appeared in his solitary environment: 

                        “That very night in Max’s room a forest grew and grew and grew

                         until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world 

                          all around and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max…”

    Sendak did not employ a passageway in the back of a wardrobe, a rabbit hole to fall into or any other entry into a magical land. The brilliance of Sendak’s transformation was that for Max the ordinary faded away to be replaced by the fantastic and when the transformation was complete, the boy was just there, dancing by the light of the moon before, quite abruptly, he was in the sailboat. The magical forest was created by Max’s own imagination, or as Sendak has said—“Children turn to fantasy: that imagined world where disturbing emotional situations are solved to their satisfaction.”

    A clue why Sendak subtly—and successfully beyond his wildest dreams—broke with fantasy’s tradition of portals may come from his own description in later years of how he had gotten his book ideas. As a young man in Brooklyn, he has said, he sat at his apartment window sketching children at play. He could well have noticed children’s playtime fantasies that were often immediate and accomplished with elastic ease. These are the times kids like to “play pretend,” in which they are instantly someone else, living somewhere else, doing something else. “Let’s be cops and robbers” or “Play like we’re on an island” a child might say, and all the friends immediately take on new personas. Or this idea was a perennial favorite: “Let’s play school and I’m the teacher.” Every one of the children simply is there, without preamble, and often with such intensity that everyday life is transformed by their imaginations into another world. No portal for these fantasies.

    A “playing pretend” scenario was what happened in Wild Things -- Max’s fantasy forest came to him, complete with an ocean tumbling by, as a creation of his own making. This was yet a third groundbreaker in Where the Wild Things Are. (In Article 17 will be presented page design as the fourth and final Sendak contribution chosen out of all those that have been written about by other students of the book.)

    Twenty years later, Chris Van Allsburg (American, 1949-) created yet another kind of fantasy world in the 1982 Caldecott Medalist, Jumanji (1981). This time, the kids Judy and Peter did not get to sail away, but rather the fantasy world invaded their own comfortable home when their parents were away. Their game board might be thought of as a portal of sorts, but it acted more like a trigger that started and stopped the fantastic events. The idea of familiar rooms turning into a nightmare was a turnabout from the usual in a fantasy and was at the heart of why Jumanji was so scary. 

    The formality of Van Allsburg’s page design, with text blocked on the left page and black-and-white illustrations framed on the right page, belied the frantic adventure the children were having. With each roll of the dice, a snake was camouflaged on the flower pattern of an upholstered chair or a lion roared from the top of the piano or monkeys wreaked havoc in the kitchen cupboards. One and only one illustration broke out of the picture frame, when rhinos invaded the dining room, and that one small detail brought the action right into the audience’s space in an unnerving way.

    Van Allsburg said in his 1982 Caldecott Acceptance Speech, “The inspiration was my recollection of vague disappointment playing board games as a child…Another motivating element for Jumanji was a fascination I have with seeing things where they don’t belong.” This element of surprise in a fantasy world is a contribution that Van Allsburg and Sendak have in common. Just as in Where the Wild Things Are, in Jumanji as well as in other early books by Van Allsburg— The Garden of Abdul Gasazi (1979), Ben’s Dream (1982) and The Wreck of the Zephyr (1983)— twists at the end implied that the plots are indeed more than just dream sequences.

    Other picture book authors and illustrators like John Burningham (British, 1936-2019) were also students of children, as in Come Away From The Water, Shirley (1977). Gail E. Haley (American, 1939-) created magical fantasy worlds in Birdsong (1984) and Sea Tale (1990). Matt Faulkner (American, 1961-) imagined The Amazing Voyage of Jackie Grace (1987) that began in Jackie’s own bathtub. After The Loathsome Dragon (1987), the extraordinary fantasy career of David Wiesner (American, 1956-) got its start with the 1989 Caldecott Honor Book, Free Fall (see Article 7). 

    Eric Rohmann (American, 1957-), author and Illustrator of The Cinder-Eyed Cats (1997) pictured a lush, multi-dimensional fantasy world into which, like Max, a young boy sailed his boat. However, here magical ocean creatures rose from the sea to dance with cinder-eyed cats on moonlit nights. Rohmann has written, “As a teenager I discovered Robert McCloskey, Wanda Gag, Virginia Lee Burton, and Maurice Sendak. I was certainly influenced by Sendak, and after I finished the book I realized it had a boy in a boat going to an island. The fish scenes, however, came from watching TV nature shows.”

    In the 21st century, authors and illustrators below continued to create works of fantasy in picture books that were exquisitely beautiful or crazily suspenseful, with or without portals. 

2002 Chris Van Allsburg (American, 1949- ), Author and Illustrator. Zathura, Houghton Mifflin, 32 pp, 9” x 11.9”

    Twenty years after Jumanji , Van Allsburg’s sequel revealed what happened to the two Budwing boys after they ran away with Judy and Peter’s board game. This time the challenges were intergalactic, involving gravity, time travel and a black hole. The illustrator’s masterful black and white imagery told a surreal story about outer space coming up close and personal in a homey room with old-fashioned patterned wallpaper. Van Allsburg also released Probuditi! (2006), done in sepia and a biography in black and white, Queen of the Falls (2011). See Articles 7 and 16.

2003  John Burningham (British, 1936-2019), Author and Illustrator. The Magic Bed, New York: Knopf, 48pp, 11.6” x 9.4”

    When Georgie said a secret word every night, his bed carried him high over the city to a meadow, a jungle, an island, the sea or right up into the sky. Burningham has said, “Drawing is like playing the piano; it’s not a mechanical skill like bricklaying, and you have to practice constantly to keep it fluent. Even after 40 years it doesn’t get any easier.” Burningham followed up with It’s A Secret! in 2009. 

2003  David Shannon (American, 1960-), Illustrator. How I Became A Pirate by Melinda Long, New York: Harcourt, 44pp, 8.5” x 11”

    Pirates asked Jeremy Jacob to come with them to bury a treasure chest because he was such a good digger for his sand castle. He got homesick after awhile (like Max), and they ended up burying the treasure in Jeremy Jacob’s own back yard. Shannon says he likes stories with bad guys in them because "you need both sides for a good story….I always thought the villains in Disney Movies were really cool", just like Shannon’s cartoon-like Captain Braid Beard and his bug-eyed, snaggle-toothed crew shown every which way, including upside down. He illustrated a sequel, Pirates Don’t Change Diapers (2007) by Melinda Long. See also Article 4 for Shannon’s David books.

2004  Barbara Lehman (American, 1963-), Author and Illustrator. The Red Book, Houghton Mifflin, 32pp, 8.2” x 8”

    In this wordless 2005 Caldecott Honor Book, a girl in the city found a red book with a picture of a boy on an island holding a red book with a picture of her in the city. She caught a bunch of balloons that lifted her high above her city and straight to his island. Lehman followed up with fantasy trips in The Museum Trip (2006), The Rainstorm (2007) and Trainstop (2008).

2005 Eric Rohmann (American, 1957- ), Author and Illustrator. Clara and Asha, Roaring Brook Press, 40 pp, 9.7” x 10.3”

Clara had an imaginary friend, an enormous fish called Asha, who smiled, introduced herself and glided in through a window at bedtime. The two played games, had a bath, a tea party and a Halloween dress-up before sailing out the window for a glorious romp in the night sky. Asha was reminiscent of the larger-than-life fish friend in the illustrator’s Cinder-Eyed Cats and the soaring escapade of a bird in his 1995 Honor Book, Time Flies. See also Article 7 for 2003 Caldecott Medalist My Friend Rabbit.

2006 Peter McCarty (American, 1966-), Author and Illustrator. Moon Plane, Henry Holt, 40 pp, 9.4” x10.4”

    A boy saw an airplane flying overhead and imagined it flying to the moon and even learning to fly it himself. When his adventure was over, he landed at home, where his mother was waiting for him, like Max’s mother. The atmosphere of a silent movie fit the nostalgic mood of a time when prop planes ruled the sky. The soft black and white illustrations are reminiscent of McCarty’s Night Driving (2001) by John Coy. See also Jeremy Draws A Monster (2009) in Article 14.

2006 David Wiesner  (American, 1956-), Illustrator. Flotsam, Clarion, 40 pp, 11.2” x 9”

    The intriguing 2007 Honor Book showed a boy’s exploration of fantastic underwater scenes and portraits of 19th century children, all captured on film in an old camera. The boy took his own picture and hurled the camera back into the sea for another child to find. To cover all the details in this twisted tale, no less than 86 illustrations occupied various sizes of vertical, horizontal or square panels and single or double page spreads. See also Article 7 for his Caldecott winners, Tuesday (1991) and The Three Pigs (2001).

2006 Uri Shulevitz (American, 1935-), Author and Illustrator. So Sleepy Story, Farrar, 32pp, 10.4” x 9.2” 

In a sleepy sleepy house all bathed in blue and gray, music drifted in a window to wake up a sleepy sleepy boy and all his sleepy sleepy things. In a delightful series of wordless illustrations, the house lightened up with yellow and orange as the music got louder (some notes on the staff were blowing their horns) and the table and chairs, pictures on the wall, dishes and teapot, all began to shake, rock and then dance. The mustachioed chair and his coquettish upholstered partner, along with high-stepping plates on the shelves, were as charming as Randolph Caldecott’s frolicking dishes and cutlery in “Hey-Diddle-Diddle.” Shulevitz also created another picture book about a little boy and his room full of things, The Moon in My Room (2003). See also Article 8. 

2009  Doug Keith (American, 1952-), Illustrator. The Bored Book by David Michael Slater, Simply Read Books, 32pp, 10.3” x 10.1”

    Two bored children annoyed Grandpa with their squabbling until he showed them a hidden stairway that led to a discovery of a mysterious book. The children unfolded its accordion-like pages and fell into a series of hair-raising adventures before returning safely to the library, where they found all the fierce characters had come from Grandpa’s books.

2013 Zuzanna Celei (Spanish, n.d.), Illustrator. Inside My Imagination by Marta Arteaga with Jon Brokenbrow, Translator, Madrid: Cuento De Luz, 24pp, 8.2” x 10.2”

Enter through the door and find words in a girl’s story that became her thoughts, magically freeing her to journey into her own world of elves, fairies, unicorns and clouds forming shapes, from which new stories came forth from more jumbled words and thoughts.  

2013 Aaron Becker (American, n.d.), Author and Illustrator. Journey, Candlewick, 40 pp, 9.8” x 10.9”

Becker’s wordless trilogy began in Becker’s 2014 Caldecott Honor Book, Journey, in which the family had been so busy that the bored little girl drew the door with her red sidewalk chalk and slipped through into a Max-like forest. She drew herself a small boat to meander downstream to a magical walled city, where the twisted Escher-type canal emptied her out right into the sky. She drew herself a hot air balloon to go flying through an armada of steampunk airships. She released an exotic bird held captive on one of the ships, and together they flew back home. In the next book, Quest (2014), the girl, a friend and the beautiful bird returned to the walled city to rescue a king, and in book 3 Return (2016) the father followed his daughter through the portal to share in her magical adventures. See Article 7. 

2016 Carson Ellis (American, 1975-), Author and Illustrator. Du Iz Tak? Candlewick, 48pp, 10.1” x 12.1”

    Ellis created in her 2017 Honor Book a turnabout scenario in which a real little plant in springtime sprouted in a fantasy world of some bespectacled, well-dressed insects speaking their own language. In this ingenious multi-faceted tour de force, the entire plot unfolded on a firm horizontal baseline for the gentle figures of the insects and pill bug “Icky.” As the plant grew taller, the group banded together to build a fort in its leaves, only to have it destroyed first by a spider’s web, then by a bird. As winter came, the scene reverted to emptiness on its horizontal base but with springtime, new plants sprouted and a new bug arrived, hinting at a new story. All figures were backlit on a white background except for two nighttime scenes; the illustrator explained, “I don’t like making cluttered compositions. I want things to feel airy and spacious, not busy. I don’t want elements of the composition to compete.” See also Article 7. 

2018 Raúl Colón (Puerto Rican American, 1952-), Author/ Illustrator. Imagine! Simon & Schuster, 48 pp, 9”x11”

    Welcoming fantasy characters into the real world did not come any better than in this wordless book. Seven iconic figures from famous paintings on MOMA’s walls jumped down to join a boy on a tour of New York City. Dancing all the way were characters from Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy, Picasso’s Three Musicians, and Matisse’s Icarus. On the way home from his adventures, the boy created his own art on a wall. Colón worked in watercolors and lithographic pencils, creating texture with stippling and cross hatching, with muted colors and striking patterns. By superimposing small illustrations on top of his spreads, the artist fleshed out the sequence of events in the filmic style of graphic novels. 

2018 Jihyeon Lee (South Korean American, n.d.), Author and Illustrator. Door, Chronicle Books, 56 pp, 9.4” x 12.4”

    In this wordless book, a boy found a key to a portal that opened into a magical world of intriguing, playful creatures. Lee's first wordless book, Pool (2015) was about a shy boy's jump into a crowded public pool, where he dove deep to a forest of fantastic aquatic creatures and plants. In both books, the real, ordinary world was rendered in delicate black, white, and gray line drawings that contrasted with the joyful fantasy worlds, drawn with vivid colored pencils and pastels. 

2019 Erin E. Stead (American, 1982-), Illustrator. Music for Mister Moon by Philip C. Stead, Neal Porter Books, 40 pp, 7.7” x 11.2”

Harriet Henry (called “Hank”) was too shy to play her cello for “crowds of people all dressed up like penguins” until she made friends with the moon, whose kind demeanor and need for adventure imbued her with self-confidence. How she managed to get to that point was all her own doing, a proactive and determined little gal with an enormous imagination that fueled every step of the fantasy. In their signature style, the Steads offered another gentle, heartwarming story in the 2011 Caldecott Medalist, A Sick Day for Amos McGee (2010), in which fantasy walked right in the front door when Amos missed work at the Zoo, so an elephant, a rhino, a tortoise, a penguin, an owl and the tiniest of birds came to find out what had happened to their friend. See Articles 7 and 15 for more about the Steads.

2019 Christian Robinson (American, n.d.), Author and Illustrator. Another, Atheneum, 56 pp, 9” x 11”

As a little girl and her cat curl up in bed, a portal opened up in the room and another cat appeared to lead them on a delightful journey into another world. They not only met other children but their own alternate selves. Was it all a dream or perhaps a parallel universe? In this wordless book, vibrant shapes danced and figures played upside down, inviting the reader to turn the page around.

2019 Barbara McClintock (American, ), Author and Illustrator. Vroom!, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 32pp. 10.4” x8.1”

    Sendak’s Max might well have met his match in little red-headed Annie, who got out her helmet, gloves and spiffy race car to go vrooming! out the second-floor window of her room. This girl loved to drive fast—and McClintock means fast—as she ate up the miles in her extraordinary adventure across farmland, up a mountain, over a river, and through a city before gliding back into her room just in time for Dad to read a story about cars for bedtime.

Ordering Bibliography

Arteaga, Marta. Inside My Imagination. Translator Jon Brokenbrow, 

illustrated by Zuzanna Celei, 2013, Madrid: Cuento De Luz 

Becker, Aaron. Return. 2016, Candlewick 

Burningham, John. The Magic Bed. 2003, Knopf 

Colón, Raúl. Imagine! 2018, Simon & Schuster 

Ellis, Carson. Du Iz Tak? 2016, Candlewick 

Lee, Jihyeon. Door. 2018, Chronicle Books

Lehman, Barbara. The Red Book. 2004, Houghton Mifflin 

McCarty, Peter. Moon Plane. 2006, Henry Holt 

McClintock, Barbara. Vroom! 2019, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 

Robinson, Christian. Another. 2019, Atheneum 

Rohmann, Eric. Clara and Asha. 2005, Roaring Brook Press 

Shulevitz, Uri. So Sleepy Story. 2006, Farrar 

Slater, David Michael. The Bored Book.  illustrated by Doug Keith. 

    2009, Simply Read Books 

Stead, Philip C. Music for Mister Moon. Illustrated by Erin E. Stead. 

    2019,  Neal Porter Books 

Van Allsburg, Chris. Zathura. 2002, Houghton Mifflin 

Wiesner, David. Flotsam. 2006, Clarion

Note: This blog was created by Lyn Lacy to share history and express personal opinions about innovative picture books. Please respect copyrights of the images which are for educational purposes only and are not to be copied for any reason.