By Shaenon K. Garrity
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Lately there's been some discussion on the Internets about the connection between comics and children's book illustration, which makes me happy because I loves me some kid lit. Here, in no particular order, are…
Shaenon's Top Five Favorite Cartoonists Who Are Also Children's Book Illustrators
John Tenniel. It's hard to imagine that
Alice in Wonderland and
Through the Looking-Glass would be quite so revered in the annals of classic children's literature, nor quite so beloved of acidheads, had they been illustrated by a conventional Victorian children's illustrator rather than a political cartoonist. Tenniel was primarily a cartoonist for the English satirical magazine
Punch, for which he drew around 2,300 cartoons in his career. He worked some of his famous caricatures into the
Alice illustrations. It's widely believed, for example, that the Lion and the Unicorn in
Through the Looking-Glass are meant to resemble warring politicians William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, and the Mad Hatter in
Alice in Wonderland also looks a bit like Disraeli (cartoonists loved to exaggerate the Jewish politician's nose). Lewis Carroll himself was probably the model for Tenniel's illustrations of the White Knight.
Later
Alice illustrators have sometimes included nods to the caricaturing tradition; woodblock engraver Barry Moser, in his haunting edition of
Through the Looking-Glass, gave Humpty Dumpty the face of Richard Nixon. But for most readers, Tenniel's versions of the characters are so iconic that it's hard to imagine the Mad Hatter's face ever belonged to anyone other than the Mad Hatter.
Tove Jansson. Holy crumbs, the
Moomin comic strip reprints from Drawn & Quarterly have been reliably blowing my mind. In the third and most recent volume, the Moomins work as lighthouse keepers, grow a jungle in their yard (complete with wild animals released from the zoo and Moomintroll playing Tarzan in a loincloth), get into a love quadrangle with some circus folk (and, occasionally, a horse), and try to make a lost Martian feel at home by painting livestock to resemble "blue, superintelligent cows."
Jansson's stories are endlessly inventive, whimsical without being cloying, and her art matches: it's cute in a sketchy, moody way, with weird flora and fauna scuttling around the backgrounds. The strips are also thoughtful and poignant, sometimes disarmingly so. I'm rapidly coming around to the opinion that
Moomin is one of the best comic strips of all time. I'm completely hooked even though—shameful confession time—I haven't read any of the children's books for which Jansson is much better known.
Also, in this volume the Moomins get locked in the zoo on suspicion of being hippos, which I think we all figured was going to happen one of these days.
Jules Feiffer. When Jules Feiffer spoke at my college in my senior year, the room was packed with Gen Xers clutching copies of the same blue paperback: Norton Juster's
The Phantom Toolbooth, memorably illustrated by Feiffer. That's how most people my age first encountered the great left-wing sociopolitical cartoonist and founder of the modern weekly comic strip. Later, if we were lucky, we discovered Feiffer's strip in the
Village Voice and his primeval graphic novels
Munro (the first) and
Tantrum (the best). And when we had kids of our own, we read the recent picture books Feiffer has written and illustrated, innocuous books with innocuous titles like
Bark, George and
I Lost My Bear. ("Don't mature!" the progonist of
Tantrum warns a toddler. "Mature people do the shit work!")
I'm a huge fan of Feiffer's strip, currently being reprinted by Fantagraphics under the title
Explainers. I can pontificate with the best of them on Bernard and Huey and the Dance to Spring and those amazing caricatures of Richard Nixon. But when I think "Feiffer," the first image in my mind's eye is still and always Tock the Watchdog.
Jack Kent. I think the first comic book I ever read was a children's book by Jack Kent. It was
Cindy Lou and the Witch's Dog, in which a little girl is forced to dog-sit a dog named Prince who has consumed so many magic potions over the years that he turns into a different animal every time he hiccups. This leads to Cindy Lou chasing the leash of a giraffe, a stork, a lion, a pigeon that gets lost in a flock of identical pigeons, and on and on. At one point Prince turns into a cat, wins a cat show, turns back into a dog, and chases an enormous mob of cats out into the street, culminating in what was and remains my favorite image in the book: the dog happily barking up at a huge tree filled with terrified cat heads. The whole book is structured as a comic, with panels and word balloons, which fascinated me.
Much later I discovered Kent's comic strip
King Aroo, in which a lion king putters around his eccentric little animal kingdom, which is equally sweet, charming, and wry. Word on the street has it that IDW is putting out the long-awaited complete
King Aroo next year. Oh, comics. Every time I think I'm out, you pull me back in.
As long as I'm on this, I want to publically apologize for stealing the hiccup thing for my webstrip
Narbonic. It was intended as a loving tribute, I swear.
Crockett Johnson. Ursula Nordstrom never really got Crockett Johnson. I'm reading
Dear Genius, a collection of letters from the legendary editor at Harper's Department of Books for Boys and Girls (yes, this is my idea of a good time), and Johnson gets the most exasperated mail of any writer who isn't chronically late. I halfway suspect Nordstrom only put up with him because he was married to Ruth Krauss, one of the finest picture-book writers of the age, whose spare prose accompanied work by such great illustrators as Maurice Sendak (in
A Hole is to Dig and others), my beloved Mary Blair (in
I Can Fly), and her own cartoonist husband (in
The Carrot Seed and many others).
But Crockett Johnson, I think, was hard to grok. Upon receiving the first draft of
Harold and the Purple Crayon, Nordstrom wrote back that "it doesn't seem to be a good children's book to me," saying, "I found myself asking such dumb questions—like
where did he draw the moon and the path and the tree?" Well, it's a legitimate question. But generations of artsy children were able to overlook the logistics of Harold's nighttime walk and embrace the fantasy of drawing your own purple crayon world out of nothing.
Johnson's drawing is as minimalist as his wife's writing; his was one of the few comic strips that ever looked right with a typed font, because the accompanying art was just as utilitarian. (Chris Onstad's
Achewood has the same effect, and for the same reason.) That strip is, of course,
Barnaby, one of the greats. Johnson's gentle 1940s-50s satire about a little boy and his pink-winged fairy godfather was never a hugely popular strip; it was too quietly smart, too cool for the comics page. But the right people got it. Among other things, it's hard to miss the influence of
Barnaby on Bill Watterson's
Calvin and Hobbes, one of the most lushly drawn and visually oriented modern strips, which just shows you how unpredictably inspiration can work.
There are many other artists I could list here. Dr. Seuss. Maurice Sendak. Raymond Briggs. Patrick McDonnell. Jill Thompson. There are popular children's books that are also comics, like Jeff Kinney's
Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. And of course there are countless children's book illustrators who didn't draw comics per se, but whose artwork and approach to merging word and image had an impact on the development of comic art. (The online discussion has revolved around Virginia Lee Burton, author/illustrator of
The Little House and
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. Man, I
wish cartoonists drew like Virginia Lee Burton.) These are just five creators who mean a lot to me personally. Comics and children's books are both such private things.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2010
