Megan Wagner Lloyd & Abhi Alwar At East City Bookshop, June 8 2024 audio & photos

Megan Wagner Lloyd & Abhi Alwar At East City Bookshop, June 8 2024 [Super Pancake]

Megan Wagner Lloyd; Abhi Alwar

Washington, DC: East City Bookshop

https://archive.org/details/megan-wagner-lloyd-abhi-alwar-at-east-city-bookshop-240608

Bruce Guthrie reflects on Childhood Favorites: 100 Years of Children’s Book Illustration exhibit

by Bruce Guthrie

 Recently,  I drove up to Hagerstown's Washington County Museum of Fine Arts museum to see the opening day of "Childhood Favorites: 100 Years of Children’s Book Illustration".  The exhibit runs until March 17.

The signage within the exhibit had some inconsistencies so I'm not entirely sure how many original works are present (the website says 140) or how many different artists are present (a sign in the exhibit says 62) but it's a bunch!  The printed signage is detailed and they made the effort to show you which of the pieces involved Newbery and Caldecott winners.

There is no catalog for sale and the exhibit brochure is mostly for kids activities so it's not that informative.  The exhibit is a traveling one and it has been making the rounds -- Google "Art Kandy Collection".  (Yep, that's apparently a real name.)

At some point, I'll have Google read the sign text for me and everything will be filled out better but I haven't had time for that.

Who's in the exhibit?  Oooh, it's extensive!  It does not have things like comic strips -- you won't find Sparky Schulz or Winsor McKay or Rose O'Neill in here.  These are the artists you'll see original works from -- I'm ignoring lithographs and copies of books.  By my count, there are 55 but I might have screwed up a couple:

 * Sarah Noble Ives -- pieces from c 1910-15
 * Peter Newell -- a drawing from c 1915
 * Anton Loeb -- the text describing his Wizard of Oz drawings mentions that the book was banned in some jurisdictions because of (1) anthropomorphized animals, (2) a strong female characters, and (3) no witches can be good
 * Campbell Grant
 * Feodor Rajankovsky
 * William Henry Bradley
 * Gustaf Tenggren
 * Tibor Gergely
 * Wesley Dennis
 * Theodor Seuss Geisel
 * Marc Simont
 * Garth Williams -- LOTS of Garth Williams...  Including a study sketch from "The Rabbits' Wedding" (1958) which was banned in places because a white rabbit was marrying a black rabbit
 * Michael Hague
 * Felicia Bond
 * Floyd Cooper
 * Tom Pohrt
 * David Wisniewski -- these were my FAVORITE pieces in the whole exhibit.  He did all of these with cut paper, mentioning he would go through as many as a thousand X-Acto knives per book.  These were great!  I've never heard of the books they were from ("Hand of the Fire Demon" and "Fire that Burns Forever", both from 1988) but he won a Caldecott Medal in 1997 for "Golem" -- if you view the book on Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/Golem-David-Wisniewski/dp/0618894241 ), you can do the [Read Sample] option and see how that one was done as well
 * William Stout
 * Richard Egielski
 * S. Saelig Gallagher
 * Deborah Nourse Lattimore
 * Audrey Wood
 * Dennis Nolan
 * Don Wood
 * Patricia Polacco
 * Karen Barbour
 * Mercer Mayer
 * Rosemary Wells -- again, LOTS of Rosemary Wells
 * James Marshall
 * Gerald McDermott
 * Maria Kalman
 * William (Bill) J. Dugan
 * Jerry Pinkney
 * Barry Moser
 * Tomie dePaola
 * Arnold Lobel
 * Anita Lobel
 * Edward Frascino
 * Jules Feiffer
 * Joan Walsh Anglund
 * Hillary Knight
 * David Shannon
 * Gary Baseman
 * Chris Raschka
 * Mark Teague
 * Joe Cepeda
 * John Bemelmans Marciano
 * Maurice Sendak
 * Mel Crawford
 * Laurent de Brunhoff
 * Richard Scarry
 * Alice Provensen and Martin Provensen
 * Ted Rand
 * William Pene du Bois
 * Leonard Weisgard

There's also a fun "Freedom to Read" lithograph by Maurice Sendak which was done for an American Booksellers Association back in 1991 to develop awareness of book censorship and to aid the ABA's Legal Defense Fund.  It was signed by a bunch of people.  The main signature I noticed was Dan Rather -- top and center -- but you can also do the treasure hunt looking for other autographs.  The sign mentions a bunch of names including Harlan Ellison, Harrison Ford, Whoopi Goldberg, Jeff Goldblum, Mickey Hart, Barry Moser, Neil Simon, Gloria Steinem, Garry Trudeau, Robin Williams, and Don and Audrey Wood.

The museum's website is https://wcmfa.org/ .  It offers free admission and free parking.  Plus it's in a gorgeous park area of the town -- there's a lake across from it -- and you may notice a new memorial to Clara Barton that's about to be unveiled near the entrance.

It's definitely worth a visit.  There's also a new exhibit "Picasso on Paper" which runs until early March.  The free gallery brochure describes in a fair amount of detail his relationships with the women in his life -- pretty much the artist version of Donald Trump minus the coup attempt.

I of course photographed the hell out of everything.  The direct link to my exhibition pictures is:

http://www.bguthriephotos.com/graphlib.nsf/keys/2023_11_25A2_WCMFA_Childhood

But some of my favorites are below.

 

Meet a Local Cartoonist: A Chat with Jonathan Roth, a Children's Book Graphic Novelist

Roth with Beep (courtesy of Roth)

by Mike Rhode

Jonathan Roth appeared recently at the Politics and Prose flagship for the second book in his Rover and Speck series. Rover and Speck are sentient planetary rovers (Rover is the one from NASA, while Speck's origin is a mystery) that meet on a Mars-like planet and then explore a water world in their second book which came out recently. After having his own event that morning, Roth came back for Roz Chast's talk and Bruce Guthrie introduced the two of us. Roth's children's book bio can be found on his website.

What type of comic work or cartooning do you do?

I write and illustrate almost solely for kids these days. My first graphic novel series, Rover and Speck, came out in 2022, with another book just released and book 3 slated for 2024. I’ve also created chapter books and picture books.

How do you do it? Traditional pen and ink, computer or a combination?

I do rough planning and character design in pencil first, but the finished art for my graphic novels is rendered and colored digitally.

When (within a decade is fine) and where were you born?

I was born in Detroit, too young to remember the first step on the moon, but I was alive for it.

Why are you in Washington (aka Rockville) now? What neighborhood or area do you live in?

Though we first settled in Ellicott City in the late 90s, so my wife could go to acupuncture school, we moved to Montgomery County when I got a job teaching elementary art here in ‘99. We’ve been in Rockville most of that time, for the past 10+ years in Twinbrook. 

When and why did you live in Zaire and the Virgin Islands?

I deferred college a year to live in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) to join my father and his wife (remarried) who were high school teachers at the American School of Kinshasa. They later taught on St. Croix, so I dropped what I was doing (not much) to spend a year there too.
 

What is your training and/or education in cartooning?

Like so many others, I started by copying characters in comic books and strips as early as 5 years old. But by the time I went to art school (Cooper Union), I was of course, like my peers, too serious an artiste to draw cartoons. But shortly after graduating I knew I wanted to write and draw above all, with a humorous bent, and my path back to cartooning (and then children’s books) was natural and fun.

Who are your influences?

Though I was addicted to Marvel and DC as a kid, I don’t see much lasting influence there. My cartoonist’s heart was mostly shaped by newspaper strips like Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes and Doonesbury. Works such as the early Star Wars movies and the Hitchhiker’s Guide books certainly taught me a lot about longer narration and humorous voice. The Simpsons, too.

Roth at Politics and Prose; photo courtesy of Bruce Guthrie 

Tell us about your alt cartoonist days in Charlottesville and other newspapers please.

In the mid to late 90s, I had hundreds of strips published by weeklies and magazines such as the C-Ville Weekly in Charlottesville (a weekly strip for a couple years), Communities Magazine and the occasional acceptance in the Funny Times and similar. But the tone of these strips was much gentler than edgy, and I don’t think the alt-scene was where I belonged. I really yearned to do more mainstream newspapers and began submitting to the syndicates. United was briefly interested in one strip, but it never went anywhere. At the same time, I was also developing my interest in writing for children, which is the path I eventually took.

Roth at Politics and Prose; photo courtesy of Bruce Guthrie 

Where did you get the idea to do a book series about planetary rovers?

I’ve followed Mars landers and rovers since I was a kid, but didn’t have an idea to make them characters until 2019, when I saw that the long-lived Opportunity rover had ‘died’ after an unprecedented 14 years on the Martian surface (it was supposed to last about 3 months, ha!) I immediately had an idea about another rover finding a fictional Oppy and bringing it back to ‘life’. Thus Rover and Speck were born!

 How did you pitch it, since you would be a new graphic novelist? Was it on the strength of your previous children's book series?

My agent did the pitching, so I don’t know all the details. Because so many publishers are looking for good graphic novels now, I doubt my chapter book series had much sway either way. This one sold as an initial three-book series. Book one takes place on a rocky world. Book two is set on a water planet. And, for the first time in kid’s sci-fi that I know about, book three will take place within the cloud layers of a gas giant! I wanted to try something especially unusual for that one.

Will we learn more about Speck's origins?

Not in book 3. But maybe if there are more books down the line!

The rovers are obviously not possible to engineer yet, in spite of AI advances. Beyond the alien life such as rock creatures, is the science in your books accurate?

Maybe a wee bit more accurate than Star Trek, haha! I do try to make the specifics more plausible than fantastical, but the more factual science connections are peppered throughout in the ‘Fun Science Facts.’

How do you decide which science panels to include?

There are cool, interesting facts about all aspects of nature, but I try to tie these panels into pertinent things happening at that point in the story. My editor usually has good suggestions around these too.

If you could, what in your career would you do-over or change?

Roth at Politics and Prose; photo courtesy of Bruce Guthrie 

My first agent, who was shopping my middle-grade novels around almost 15 years ago but knew about my comics background, wondered if I could do comics for kids. For some reason I wasn’t thinking in those terms yet, though if I was, I could have possibly been on the ground floor of the current kid’s graphic novel boom (I met Andy Runton at SPX around then, and books like his Owly were definitely spinning gears in my head).

What work are you best-known for?

For my work an art teacher! I mean, I teach 500+ kids a week, each student body continually replenished for 25 years. In the wider world, my Beep and Bob chapter book series is probably still the best known of my kid’s books. 

What work are you most proud of?

It’s such a longshot getting any work traditionally published in children’s books these days, so I’m grateful for all my books. If I’m proud of anything it’s my perseverance, because that’s been the key.

What would you like to do or work on in the future?

Another graphic novel series. And more picture books. No lack of ideas! Just time…

What do you do when you're in a rut or have writer's block?

Go for a walk or bike ride. Most of my ideas come to me while not in the chair (though sitting and composing is the only way to work them out). Active bodies are active brains!

What do you think will be the future of your field?

So bright, people will be wearing shades! Not likely me, but someone.

What local cons do you attend? The Small Press Expo, Awesome Con, or others? Any comments about attending them?

I’ve been attending the Small Press Expo for about 20 years, since back when it was in a hotel in Bethesda (now at the Mariott convention center closer to me). Anyone into comics, especially those beyond superhero, should definitely go! I attend occasional other cons, but most of the events I attend and/or appear at are book festivals: the Gaithersburg Book Festival, Fall for the Book, the Chesapeake Children’s Book Festival and more.

Roth at Politics and Prose; photo courtesy of Bruce Guthrie 

What comic books do you read regularly or recommend? Do you have a local store?

Just about all the kidlit and adult comics I read can be found in good indie bookstores, like Politics and Prose (where, in the last week alone, I attended talks by creators as diverse as Stephen Pastis and Roz Chast; I also spoke there too, smiley face). Sadly there are no indies in Rockville (boo!), but the new People’s Book in Takoma Park has a cool comics selection, and I’ll travel to NoVa for Bards Alley, Scrawl, One More Page or Hooray for Books (why is NoVa so much better than MoCo this way? Discuss). And MoCo Libraries has built a great collection.

What's your favorite thing about DC?

That I can ride all the way from Rockville to the Mall on beautiful bike trails (Rock Creek Trail, Capital Crescent, C and O) to visit some of the best museums in the world. For free!

Least favorite?

That there’s such a profound equity/wealth gap.

What monument or museum do you like to take visitors to?

The National Gallery is my happy place. Great Falls is a spectacular outdoor spot.

How about a favorite local restaurant?

I’m boring about dining. The Silver Diner is our main bag.

Roth at Politics and Prose; photo courtesy of Bruce Guthrie 

Do you have a website or blog?

www.beepandbob.com

How has the COVID-19 outbreak affected you, personally and professionally?

Such a strange, surreal time! Fortunately we found a way to keep schools (and teaching jobs) going during the pandemic, so for me it was more of a mental than financial hardship. I wrote and sold a book in 20-21, and my series has survived, so I’m grateful there. Plus somehow I still haven’t had Covid myself! But with all we should have learned, I’m worried we aren’t going to be prepared for the next pandemic.

Chatting with Steve Metzger, visiting children's graphic novel writer

by Mike Rhode

This weekend children's book writer Steve Metzger came to Alexandria to do a reading and signing at Hooray for Books. The book is for young readers - I was definitely the oldest person sitting in the crowd as he read from two of his picture books, and then an abridged version of the entire The Bumble Brothers: Crazy for Comics. I enjoyed chatting with him and asked him to do a interview. You can sign up for his newsletter at this link.

What type of comic work or cartooning do you do?

I'm a writer of graphic novels for 8-11 year olds.

Why is Bumble Brothers a graphic novel? Why is it your first one?

The Bumble Brothers is a graphic novel because I want it to excite "reluctant readers" about reading. If you're 8 or 9 years old and you're not reading, you're in trouble. The humor that I liked when I was 9 years old is humor I still enjoy. It's my first one because all of the prior books that I authored were picture books. I was ready to move on to graphic novels.

How did you find an artist to work with on it?

When my daughter was 4 years old, she really enjoyed the illustrations of a beginning reader book called, "Two Crazy Pigs." I never forgot Brian Schatell's illustrations and when I started looking for an illustrator for the Bumble Brothers, I contacted him.

How long did the book take from start to finish? There's going to be more than 1 published?

From start to finish, this book took about one year. It took about 3 months for me to write and revise the script; it then took Brian almost a year to do the illustrations. It took about longer for him because he has a full-time job. There are going to be three books in the series.

How do you do it? Traditional pen and ink, computer or a combination? (i.e., do you just write a script, or do thumbnails, or lay it all out w/ descriptions of what should be happening in each panel)

I'm not sure what Brian's process is when he does his amazing illustrations. I give him a script which includes approximately 230 panels. This seems to be a good number for a 96-page graphic novel.

When (within a decade is fine) and where were you born?

I was born in NYC in 1949. I spent the first 20 years of my life in Queens.

What area do you live in? Why were you visiting Washington now?

I now live in the upper westside of Manhattan. I was visiting the Washington area (Alexandria, VA) because I was invited to read the Bumble Brothers at "Hooray for Books," a terrific bookstore run by Ellen Klein.   

What is your training and/or education in writing children's books?

Most of my earlier books are picture books and I guess a lot my training for writing for young children came from my teaching experiences.

Who are your influences?

My favorite children's authors and illustrators are: Leo Lionni, Ezra Jack Keats, John Steptoe, Lewis Carroll, Tedd Arnold, and Maurice Sendak. The Bumble Brothers' book is filled with silliness; my comedic influences (especially from when I was young) are: Abbott and Costello, the Marx Brothers, Lucille Ball, Stan Freberg, Charlie Chaplin, Carol Burnett, Bob and Ray, Jerry Lewis, Steve Allen, Jackie Gleason, Laurel and Hardy, Allan Sherman, Sid Caesar, and Jack Benny.

If you could, what in your career would you do-over or change?

That's a tough one. I spent a lot of time in dead-end jobs, e.g., dishwasher and taxi driver. Perhaps it would have been better for me if I did something else during those years, but I really didn't know what I wanted to do. Looking back, every job I've ever had kinda prepared me for the next one.

What work are you best-known for?

I think the most popular book of mine is a picture book: "We're Going on a Leaf Hunt." Based on the song, "We're Going on a Bear Hunt," it didn't take a long time to write and it's a perennial bestseller in autumn. 

What work are you most proud of?

I'm most proud of my collaboration with Tedd Arnold on our picture book, "Detective Blue." I love his illustrations and I like the idea of a noir Mother Goose mystery filled with nursery rhyme characters.

What would you like to do or work on in the future?

If it's possible, I'd like to continue writing more Bumble Brothers' books. #2, "The Bumble Brothers: The Not-So-Secret Clubhouse" is coming out in Fall 2023 and #3, "Frabbit: The Birth of a Superhero" will be out in 2024.

What do you do when you're in a rut or have writer's block?

When I have writer's block, I don't force it. A bike ride around Central Park often does the trick of clearing my head and gets me going again.

What do you think will be the future of your field?

There seems to be a big growth spurt in all kinds of graphic novels. I think this will continue until there's saturation.

What comic books or graphic novels do you read regularly or recommend?

I enjoy reading other humorous graphic novels, like Big Nate, Action Presidents, InvestiGATORS, Max Meow, and The Bad Guys. In a more serious vein, I also enjoy these graphic novels: American Born Chinese, This One Summer, and Blankets.

What's your favorite thing about DC?

I love walking around and DC is a great city for self-guided walking tours.

Least favorite?

Living in New York City, I am well aware about the problems of homelessness. Still, I wish there weren't so many homeless in the DC area. Also, the heat and humidity in the summer months.

What monument or museum do you like to visit?

While in Alexandria, I enjoyed my visit to Mount Vernon -- a fascinating place! When I visit Washington DC, I really like visiting the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Do you have a website or blog?

http://www.stevemetzgerbooks.com

How has the COVID-19 outbreak affected you, personally and professionally?

Personally, I was saddened by the death of a close friend’s relative. Professionally, I was lucky to have met my agent right before the outbreak of COVID-19. Since I write from home, I wasn't that affected on a day-to-day basis.

Book Review: Beaky Barnes: Egg on the Loose by David Ezra Stein

 by Claire Rhode

            Beaky Barnes: Egg on the Loose (Penguin Workshop, $18.99) is a delightful romp. David Ezra Stein has channeled the energy of early Saturday morning cartoons into a graphic novel for younger readers. Reading it reminded me of watching a Pink Panther cartoon, where nothing quite made sense, but the hijinks were top notch.

            I have to imagine that was the tone Stein was going for when he started the book with a cast of characters and then uses them in an advertisements section (don’t worry – unless you’re the sort of person who goes in for wild infomercials, you’re not likely to want to buy his glow-in-the-dark sunglasses model).

            The story itself starts with Inspector Cobb, the town health and safety inspector, attempting to eat an fried egg sandwich and losing the egg from it. Naturally, he goes to a nearby café to get a new egg, where he threatens the owner with an inspection if an egg is not procured. This is where we meet Beaky, a giant chicken. She’s the tallest of the main characters, but she produces normal-sized eggs. This is never explained, but sometimes you don’t need explanations. Beaky Barnes takes too many detours to coherently describe the plot. A goldfish goes off to college and it somehow gets weirder, but it never loses its sense of joy or adventure. It can be easy for a book this wacky to lose sight of what actually matters – fun. Stein creates humorous, absurd scenarios and asks the reader to laugh along without taking anything too seriously.

        Some pros include:

·         -The art style. This is a deceptively simple book. It has a small color palette, and backgrounds are often left vague or are entirely non-existent, but each page balances itself well. It is always visually interesting and only rarely overwhelming.

·         -Subtle jokes. Like many Saturday morning cartoons, there are some jokes tossed in just for the adults reading along.

·         -Remember those ads I mentioned? They end up being (semi-)plot relevant. It’s not just fun, it also matters later on!

 Some cons:

·         -While I had fun reading this, 114 pages was close to being too long for me. For an actual child it would probably be a good amount of story and humor.

·         -May lead to egg confusion for some children. Parents may need to explain that most grocery store eggs are not fertilized.

·         -The name Beaky Barnes is similar to a certain Marvel character and his sister. My search results were confused while checking on some details for this review. Not an actual problem for the story, but check your autocorrect when ordering.

      All in all, I would recommend this story. It would be a great bridge for reluctant readers transitioning from picture books to more independent reading. Enjoy reading Beaky Barnes: Egg on the Loose – it’s a surprisingly relevant book, as anyone who has tried to buy eggs at a grocery store recently knows. And, more importantly, it’s an enjoyable comedy for the kids (big and small) in your life.

 Claire Rhode, a former children's book seller, is now studying to be a children's book librarian.

"Who Is This Gallant Girl of Greatness?” A Chat with Brian Biggs about "My Hero"

by Mike Rhode

Recently Brian Biggs came down to DC to look at original art at the Library of Congress and talk to the librarians about preserving his own work. After that, he and I met for lunch on a Library patio, to talk about My Hero, his new book about a child superhero. We were joined by Prints & Photographs librarian Sara Duke and my daughter Claire Rhode, a former children’s book seller, who were invited to ask questions as well.

The book’s secret origin

Mike Rhode: The book we're talking about is My Hero, Brian's new book about “is she or isn't she a super heroine named Awesome Girl?” Describe the book for us.

Brian Biggs: Well, haha, you just did. But Publisher’s Weekly published a capsule description and review.

MR: Ok, then how did you come up with the idea for it?

BB: The idea for the book was hatched over lunch way back in 2007, believe it or not. I was talking with my friend Tamson, who was an editor for Hyperion and other children’s publishers about the characters I like to write. Both of us had young kids at the time, around seven and five, and I seemed to be wanting to tell stories about kids that age. These little kids who have these rich internal lives separate from the larger world and an absolute belief in themselves that anything is possible. As parents, we don’t really share that belief, because it’s our job to keep them safe. So this little kid, named Jeff at the time, wants to do something and it might be just helping the old lady across the street. But we as parents are like, “Oh wait, look both ways…  don't do that thing.“ Or, or in my kid's case, it was walking down the dirt road at their grandma's house to fetch the mail. It's an old house set back in the woods and the mailbox is down this dirt road just a quarter mile away. There's nothing really that can happen to them, but of course, as parents, we can think of 5,000 things that can happen to them. And so, for my kids, their thoughts were, “We're going to go get the mail for mom and dad” or whatever, but we're like, “Don't get hurt, don’t get kidnapped, don’t fall down.”  So, this started as an idea, it was just a sketch, a one-inch tall sketch of a book called Jeff Hero. The sketch was a little boy sitting on a hilltop with his bicycle lying next to him and his cape flapping in the wind and his hands on his hips. And it says, in the same lettering that I use here in My Hero, it says “Jeff Hero” coming down from the top in sort of in a Schoolhouse Rock sort of way. Sometimes you do something like that and you think, “Huh, I don’t know what this story is about or what it means, but that's going to be a book someday.”

Years later, actually just as I began work on this actual book, I found a paragraph in the same sketchbook where the kid, Jeff, has found two rocks, and he's talking to someone about these two rocks. At the end of the paragraph, we realize that the someone he's talking to is a bird. So, apparently, there was a talking bird in this story. And I didn't know anything about it. Where did this come from? It was kind of fun to read, but I don't know what it is.

I was on a bike ride about three years ago, where I do a lot of thinking, and I realized that Jeff isn’t Jeff. Jeff is actually a little girl, and Mom's not Mom, Mom is Dad. And that shift made everything fall into place at that point, because for me, this made the story about my own kid, who was going through his own transition. So now the person who I believed to be my daughter is my son. It was that it was during that period where he was announcing his transition, and I realized I'm not giving him his own space to be this person he is. As an adult, I was forcing something else, maybe… I don't know what. I'm still not always comfortable with the whole idea, but you have to back out of the way of a young adult at some point, right? And so, the same way Dad has to back out of the way of Abigail in the book and let Abigail be the hero she truly is, and save him from Purple Octopus. Purple Octopus is all of our fears that manifest however they want to manifest.

There are enough clues in the book so that a kid could convince a parent that Abigail really is Awesome Girl, and this is all a true story; but of course, a parent sees it as merely a metaphor. “Oh, you're still just pretending, and I didn't really get caught by the purple octopus,” but are little clues.

Near the end of the story, when Dad announces that he really does believe in her, he breaks his glasses. That's in the big comics action sequence, which is ostensibly a fantasy, yet at the very end, back at home, which is very much reality, he's sitting here at the table with his glasses taped up. It's one of those little tiny clues where I want a seven-year-old to go “Oh! Wait a minute!” The fourth time she reads it. Then, of course, Harry, the cat sidekick, is sitting here winking at us with his mask still on. It was important to find ways of making it either/or.  The things my children remember, like a road trip in 2004, and your child says, “Oh yeah, we were doing this.” and you're saying, “No, we didn’t do that that,” and you have completely different variations of the same moment. I love that. So how can I put that in a story? That's sort of the origin story. I originally had a back story where the cat refers to some prior rivalry with Purple Octopus. It was written at first, “Purple Octopus, I'm the one you really want. Release the child's father.” My editor finally said, “It's a great line, but we have to get get rid of it.” It opens doors that don't need to be opened in this case. But in my head, they've got this millennia-long battle for good and evil over the years, that now Abigail and her father are part of in this particular blip. And that would've meant that Purple Octopus says, “You haven't seen the last of me, Awesome Girl and Harry” having to bring Harry into it too. I like that sort of thing, but sometimes it's confusing for people <laughs> in a picture book for five-year-olds.

On coloring, and his media of choice

BB: The book begins with a cat in a tree over seven spreads, so I drew this tree seven times. But I must have actually drawn that tree about 40 times, as sketches, as practice, just different ways, different methods, different media, different ways of doing it. This is like performance art in a sense where, when I start drawing these leaves, it’s in real-time with different colored inks set out with water and the way they bleed is important, and I can’t stop in the middle. I would turn off my phone <laugh> and I needed an hour… I'm going to draw a tree and I can't get up. So those are the days I couldn't take the dog to the studio, cuz if he starts giving me a hassle when I'm in the middle of the tree, it would never work. It was strange and new for me.

MR: So the leaves are done with ink and not watercolor?

BB: It's colored ink. The ink is a lot more vivid than watercolor and the Liquitex Acrylic inks are super bright, so I would fill up a little one of those trays, with the little compartments with different colors, and some in the same compartment because I knew I was going to mix 'em anyway, and I could swirl 'em and get certain mixes. Timing when things were going to be dry and when they weren't…  this color all bleeds together, but then with the pencil there, I make that leaf finished, in a way that you can’t with watercolor.

MR: So after it's dry, you go back in and differentiate some of the leaves?

BB: Yes. The day after this is drawn, the basis of the illustration, I would come in the next day and start drawing all the colored pencils and stuff. So this [tree at the beginning of the book] was an overlay of like a Paynes Grey, which is a cool purpleish gray; the whole tree is then colored with different shades of light blue ink, dark blue ink and green inks. And then pastel is the next layer on the tree, all smeared together with a stub, one of those drawing stubs. And then the bark texture goes on top of that. So, it was a three-step process.

MR: It’s a very multimedia approach.

BB: And I had to really be careful around the edges of this orange cat that’s stuck up in the tree.

MR:  You said you had normally had not done a process like this?

BB: Well yes, my comics in the 90s. But it’s different so let’s skip my comics for a minute and start with children's books. Starting in 2002, either the work was black and white ink drawings, or if it was color, it was all in Photoshop. Everything ran through Photoshop. So the way I did most of the books that I illustrated was that I would draw it in black and white ink, and then scan it into Photoshop, the inked lines would get color, or else I would add color the way you'd color in a coloring book. Everything Goes is done that way. Those ink drawings exist as black and white drawings, which might be interesting to the Library of Congress, because I always like seeing color work where it's not color, like, “Oh, that's black and white in real life.” And then all that color work in Everything Goes, and all the textures, are all completely digital. Same with Tinyville Town, and all of the books I illustrated. In fact, some of the Frank Einstein books were even drawn completely on the computer, just because of deadlines.

MR: Right. I remember being disappointed about that.

BB:  Well, the first book is all analog, but the second through sixth books are digital. I developed a Photoshop brush, a fake virtual brush that I use with my Wacom tablet, that kind of looks like my own way of drawing. It was just that you can get it done so much quicker. And that's kind of when, I think in 2017 or ‘18, is when I just started thinking “I'm so done with this.” I was even drawing sketches on the computer, and there's part of that process that facilitates it, but then also the iPad got popular for illustration. Procreate is the Photoshop-like app for the iPad, and brushes are now marketed as looking like say riso-printing, or looking like screen printing, or watercolor, or looking like old commercial art from the fifties and sixties, and it's unbelievably realistic. You can't believe how good it is. The texture of the paper is there. It's remarkable. And of course, me being the contrarian that I am, I said as the world is moving one way “Wait a minute. I'm not flying in that supersonic airplane. I'm going to take that horse and buggy.” But I also wanted to know, after drawing 70 books, I wanted to know, “Can I do this?” I always was envious of looking at Sendak’s work, or Scarry, or Mary Blair and how they managed to do that with these old proper art supplies. But also, even looking at today's artists like Beatrice Alemagna’s and, so many European illustrators, they do a lot of beautiful work. When you see Beatrice Alemagna’s actual art, her drawings are enormous. There are pieces of cardboard glued to paper, and pencil, and she's got pastels everywhere. And I think, “now that's an artist, I want to go home with my hands dirty every night.” When The Spacewalk, my previous book, didn’t sell very well, I said, “Screw it. The pandemic pushed everything up a year, I have all the time in the world now, so I'm going to do it the way I wanna do it.” And I taught myself to do it.

MR: You had done coloring prior to children’s books though?

BB: Yes, but more of a mechanical screen print, layered style. Using separations. That was the way I'd done color, like the posters from the comics days, and even a lot of illustrations that I did for commercial work, and Tinyville Town was colored this way. Tinyville Town only used seven actual colors. The purple and the yellow overlaid made a brown. When you look at the layers in Photoshop, it looks like screen print layers. There will be a purple layer and a yellow layer and a transparent overlay effect called multiply. It's like you're looking through film. So for ground, I might use a rough Photoshop brush and do the purple, and then a rough yellow on the layer beneath it. The two together create this textured brown, but you can still see the purple and the yellow in between some of the spaces, which for me is really fun, but there's not an eight-year-old in the world that cares. So all it does

is just kind of create a look and a feel. The shadows in Tinyville Town are a layer of one light blue that are drawn on, and so if it goes over a white area, it's blue, but if it goes over the yellow, it creates a green. But that's the way, just like these shadows around us aren't gray, they're blue because of the sky. It's just a light theory thing, but it looked like the way I wanted it to look, so that's the way I created those. Very much not like painting. If they were drawn, before Photoshop, if they were done non-digitally, they would be layers of what I saw today in art by Seymour Chwast, those overlays of red rubylith. These colored films would be photographed just in black and white. Then when they're run through the press, the four color press, they would have X percent of magenta or X percent of cyan or whatever. So that's the way my brain puts images together normally. This new book has been, to me, a revelation. I mean, it's the most traditional looking book I've made, but it's the one that was the most complex in the way of planning it out and figuring out how I was going to do it. And I love that these pages exist as actual paintings in a drawer in my studio. You can look at a page and it looks like this printed page. No parts of it are separate. The lettering is not separate. That is a painting.

MR: You did the lettering on the artwork?

BB: In most cases, but of the small text lettering was done separately.

MR: The stuff that looks like more like typography, even though you hand lettered it?

BB: Yeah. The lettering was about a quarter inch tall, so my eyes didn't completely break out of my head, I shrunk it down for the book.

MR: Is the city based on a real city?

BB: No, it's just a city. It's a kind of like Power Puff Girls always had Townsville, the Incredibles have Metroville It’s this generic town I just try to draw with a fake-looking toy Empire State Building. Using different colors and playing around with drawing the buildings, but it's not based on any city, just big old buildings.

MR: I asked, because you have been in Philadelphia for 20 years, a long time to be in one place when you wandered the world when you were younger.

BB: Right? For my first 22 years, I lived in 6 cities. In my thirties, I was in San Francisco mostly, and then moved to Philadelphia in 1999 from San Francisco, and I've been there ever since.

MR: When you were a cartoonist, you were in Paris?

BB: Yeah. I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas until I was 11 - born and raised in Little Rock, and then we moved to the Houston area from age 11 to 17. I went to a town called Denton for one years of college at North Texas State University, went to New York City to Parsons for sophomore year of college, Paris for junior year, back to New York for senior year, then back to Paris for a year to work. That's when I drew Frederick and Eloise. I’d discovered Tardi and the great French cartoonists, and again, had found myself unemployed with nothing to do. I had 5,000 bucks in the bank, drew this book, spent the money, and went back home to the Dallas / Fort Worth area. I was there for two years and in ‘93 moved to San Francisco where I met my kids' mom. We eloped in Vegas, then moved to Philadelphia because she was from Trenton, NJ and we wanted to be near family. 22 years later, I've seen the Phillies win the World Series, I've seen the Eagles win the Super Bowl, and I finally accept I live there. I'm still a Razorbacks fan. I still follow Texas politics, which is a sad state of affairs. But when the Eagles won the Super Bowl, I'm out in the street crying and hugging strangers. “Okay, I live in Philly now. Wow. I accept it.” My kids were in my living room that night, my wife, and my ex-wife and my kid's stepfather... We had 25 people in our living room and from that part of my life and there's so much emotion about a stupid football game, but it's the first time the Eagles have ever won. And that city loves its sports. We were out on the streets three days later for the parade in the mud. It was 25 degrees and it was an amazing experience. And you just embrace what it is. I mean, I'm not from Philly, but I'm from Philly. However, in my neighborhood I'll always be a yuppy because I've “only” been there 22 years. I lived in one house 11 years and moved a few blocks away for now another 11 years. But for the lady down the street who has lived there her whole life, as far as she's concerned, I'm just an interloper. That's one of the reasons I love Philly -- the crazy racist neighbor next door. <laughs>

MR: This children's book just dropped May 3^rd. Let's go back to the artwork on here. The dad definitely looks like Clark Kent on the cover.

BB: It's been mentioned. Yes. It was not intent of mine, but it may be subconscious. When I read a review on Book List, it said Dad has a Clark Kent-resemblance and I thought, “Oh, yeah, he does.” I love it when someone points something out to me that is not obvious, but it was obvious to them.

MR: You didn't do that on purpose, but you did do something special about the book cover?

BB: Yes, there are two covers. If you remove the paper dust cover off of the hardback cover, you see the superhero comic book-type cover underneath, and that was definitely planned. Later in the book, there was a scene where Dad, who is not Clark Kent, yanks his his shirt off to reveal the superhero “A” underneath. That is the Clark Kent moment. The covers go from the dad-daughter relationship where he’s carrying her, to one where the daughter is in charge and she's the main character.

MR: Is the “A” for Awesome for everybody in the family and not just Abigail, if Dad has it on his shirt?

BB: It’s only for Abigail. Dad has it on his shirt too because he is revealing that he does, he really does truly believe in her.

But it’s funny, because her name has been many things. It was Theo for a long time and she had a “T” emblem and I think it was changed because we couldn't think of a modifying adjective. Before that it was Samantha. She was Sam. The problem with the “S is the legal team at Penguin came to us and said, “Excuse me, but there's a famous trademarked “S” on a shirt in red and yellow that we can't really challenge, so we need to change the name.” And I saw that coming a mile away, but just thought I'd push it. Luckily, I hadn't started on the artwork yet. We had changed “T” to “S” as Super Sam is easy and obviously suitable. “T” -- was it Thunder Theo? What's that? Terrific Theo doesn't work. So I asked some little girl I know, maybe my niece, “What would your superhero name be if you had one?” And she said, “Awesome Girl.” I realized it doesn't have to be Super Sam, or Awesome Anna. It's Awesome Girl. And that works really well.

If you read the book’s opening, it's her internal dialogue -- “Look! There! A frightened feline!” The video that's online on YouTube and Vimeo has my niece doing this voiceover. She's 11, but she did the voice just like Abigail would've been saying in her own head, “Desperate to ESCAPE, is there ANY HOPE for HARRY?” It's sort of that “It's a bird, it's a plane, it’s SUPERMAN” line. She asks the question, “WHO will save the day?” and then she answers, “I will.” And then quicker than lightning, da, da, da, and then “Who is this Mystery Marvel? This Daring Defender? This Gallant Girl of Greatness?” She's leaping to the tree. We turn the page, and Dad answers the question. It's Abigail, except it's not Abigail. It's Awesome Girl. So again, that dialogue's playing with each other there.

“A” became Abigail and Awesome Girl, and Awesome Girl -- there's something unsophisticated about it. It's like a little kid. “Oh, Awesome Girl!” That works really well for me. The dad happens to have a shirt too that says “A” on it, but that's part of the question. Is this real? Is it not real? Why would dad have that shirt? It's because he believes in her, and he rips his white shirt off, and there it is. There's proof of his believing in her. There's another double entendre. What does that mean to believe in your kid? Is he really believing his kid or is he believing in his kid? It's not a book that I could have written before I had my own children.

Her towel becomes a cape, Dad's folding her pajamas and her towel so when she has this moment where the cat accidentally kicks the plastic octopus out the window, and then suddenly says, “Look there!” (which, by the way, is the same lettering as the very beginning). It's very easy to say, “this is all in her sitting in the bathtub, with her angry imagination of having this fantasy of her dad getting kidnapped.” Originally, when it was “Jeff Hero,” Mom was kidnapped by a robot, and the whole story was what does Jeff have to do to save his mom from a robot? When I spun back around to her, a robot is so boring in this case, but having it be a purple octopus that started out as a bathtub toy became kind of this harmless polarity. How do you make an octopus both friendly and menacing at the same time?

MR: The villain Octopus still has a smile, but it's got lowered slanted eyebrows and the cat now wears a mask.

BB: The eyebrows are everything, and he's also really big.

Claire Rhode: That’s like Perry the Platypus from Phineas and Ferb. They own a platypus, but he's always sneaking behind their back to fight his nemesis Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz. It just seems like your original idea for Harry is similar, because the kids stumble into Dr. Doofenshmirtz and end up battling him. But there’s always the platypus in the background as the secret agent.

BB: I don’t know the cartoon, but I liked the idea, like I was saying originally, of Harry being the puppet master behind everything. I couldn't dive in deep enough though. If this was a bigger book, then I could dive into him.

CR: You didn't have several seasons like a tv show.

MR: Your agent didn't push you to make this more like Dog Man, or make this a series and a smaller size?

BB: In fact, that's an interesting point with this book that I've wondered about a lot. This book was the unnamed second book of a two-book deal. They bought The Space Walk and another picture book, and to Penguin's credit, they never asked me what the other picture book was going to be. It was just, “Okay, we're done with The Space Walk,” and right before COVID, Kate, my editor at Dial, says, “What are you working on next?” I showed her some sketches that had the lettering and little boy saying, “Who is that? How is she so awesome?” And Kate was always saying “We’ve got to get that little boy in there.”  I responded, “He's not in there, but the lettering is there. So that works.” This really never had to be pitched as a book, and I don't know if it could have been. I don't know if I could have explained at the time, because I would've had to finish it more. Luckily it really was allowed to kind of grow out of whatever into something else, and I always appreciated that.

Like the process, before the book began to be illustrated, of figuring out how to draw the octopus and especially the cat. I must have drawn this cat, five or six hundred times. It's funny to see that I have a folder just of cat drawings on my computer, scanned in from my sketchbooks, and seeing him turn into this. He's so much more cartoony than he began. He was in the tree for the longest time and I wasn't even thinking of him as a sidekick. He was just a cat in the tree. And then I realized, “Oh, she's saving him,” and I gave Harry a name and I realized, “He's your sidekick.” It's later on in the writing that comes about.

MR: Let me ask two process questions. One's about layout and one's about your sketchbooks. So do you thumbnail the book? Do you write the script? Or do you do one page at a time and get surprised?

BB: <Laugh> It's all three actually. At some point I start thinking of what are signposts in this story. In this case you had the tree; I knew there was going to be a tree section. For a while, it was going to be ten spreads and it got cut down to seven, thank goodness. Then I knew there was going to be the bathtub scene. I remember the revelation of thinking, “Oh my gosh, some of it's told in comics -- this whole fantasy scene in comics.” Both this book and Spacewalk follow a pattern that Where The Wild Things Are established, which is a kid whose angry at parents and then going into a fantasy world. For The Space Walk, it's “I want to go out and take a walk,” and the parents/ground control say, “You have to clean your room.” He's frustrated, but he's an astronaut, and it's ground control talking. And then he is allowed out on his walk and he meets the monster of Where The Wild Things Are

, but in my case, it's that alien with the wiggly legs. He makes friends and then comes back home and says, “Can I go out again tomorrow?” and they say, “You have  do your astronaut duties.” Well, that's one way of looking at Where The Wild Things Are. In My Hero, Dad is a real instigator. In Where The Wild Things Are, Max's mom just says, “You have to go to your room, because you're bad.” So Max sits in there and fantasizes about this monster world.

So this is much closer to that, where she's in the bathtub with her arms folded. In fact, originally, she was in bed and Dad says goodnight to her, but my editor -- and this is where editors are worth her weight and gold -- said, “Dream sequences, meh, it's been done a million times.” In fact, Where The Wild Things Are is technically a dream sequence. She asked, “Is there another place you could have the girl, at the time Samantha, be to have this anger?” I responded, “Yeah, the bathtub, that totally works.” Because Dad leaves her and says, “All right, dry yourself off and come on, I’m making dinner. She's like “Grrrr.” She's angry, so she has this whole fantasy in the bathtub. Instead of the land of the monsters where Max goes, hers is this world with her and her cat saving the day. In fact, this is an homage to Sendak. When at the end, Max walks back into find the soup in his bedroom. I drew her, and it is exactly the same drawing. It's just it's Abigail instead of Max and so far, no one's caught that. I doubt anybody ever will, but I like it and I'm happy it's there. The resolution at the end, where Max gets soup and she gets spaghetti, I love that sort of thing.

So there were sign posts, establishing the rhythm of this happens and that happens and then this other thing happens. Then what I do is I'll go in and focus on just the first part and write it completely out without any editing. And then the second part: what happens the bathtub scene? 

And then at some point I will write the whole story as just text -- the dialogue, the action as if the story's being told. My editor needs that to basically to run it through copy editing. They've got their whole channels that they send it through at Dial. In in my case, it's always sort of unspoken that this may or may not be the final. Things are going to get changed and I don't write books that way. I don't write books in text. Actually, it's an interesting thing, because as an illustrator, when I get a manuscript by another author, there's almost never stage setting the way I write mine. Like there will never be a “Abigail poking your head up when around the door” -- it would just be “time to eat” and then I figure out what that is. If an author starts writing that kind of stuff, I don't want to deal with it. I I'll ignore it. I'll cut it out with the Word file and throw it away because want to stage it myself.

MR: Although that is sometimes a traditional way of people working on comic books, like Alan Moore famously sketching every little thing in for his artist. Whereas the Marvel method is more like “Here's five words, go draw something, figure it out.”

BB: Yeah! I remember years ago, a novelist friend of mine wrote what he thought was a children’s manuscript, and he had it start out with a rabbit waking up, and coming out of the hole, and it was a beautiful day outside. He described everything in detail in the text, and I went back, and this is before I ever did a picture book, and said, “All you have to do is say, “Andrew woke up one morning.” Not even that, but maybe something like “Andrew was looking forward to his day.” Because then that's something I can't really illustrate, what is his internal dialog. So what it is is Andrew gets up, pours himself a cup of coffee, goes up, looks out of his hole and it's a gorgeous day outside. That's my job, as the illustrator. So I, as an author-slash-illustrator, I always have a hard time. Editors always tell me, I'm pushing my words too much to carry the weight of the story, but the illustrations need to do that. Because I'll write something like “frog was sitting on the lily pad” but, frog is already on the lily pad. We don't need to be told that -- we're seeing that. So what you can do is skip right to “frog was hungry” and you see a fly buzzing around. You're making that connection, what's about to happen.

MR: We're both in our fifties and when reading comic books in our youth, the words just reinforced what was drawn.

BB: The only narrative part of this book is, where she's in the bathtub and I don't need to say, “Little hero Abigail thought to herself,” because clearly that's what she's doing. “As he went to make dinner,” that sets up later on, so that's important. I'm not saying he's folding her clothes., I have a good editor for this stuff, because she was saved me from myself where I would've said something like “Abigail was standing on the toilet in the bathroom as her father ran a bath.” Delete it. It's already there, you know?. I've never worked off of a strip comic script before. I'm doing a Little Golden Book right now where they actually send a script on a page with what is going to be on each page. You know, green garbage truck here and over here, you see a neighborhood full of people of different colors.

MR: It's more of an illustration job, and less of a creative job in some ways.

BB: Very much so for Little Golden Books. Work for hire jobs are the same way, but I don't do them anymore. When I used to, I’d get them very methodically structured. When I was last here in 2017, the book that I was reading with Mac Barnett was one of the best picture book scripts I've ever illustrated because it had one piece of description. I’ll give you two examples. Mac wrote, “It begins on the bottom floor of a tall, multi-story building.” And then it says, “A boy woke up” and the story begins and everything else in illustration was up to me. He didn't describe anything. The entertaining part of that book was figuring out how to, in a horizontal book, tell a vertical story. The structure of that book is one that I've given presentations on. I did it with color coding, because it has to build upward through the book and the whole layout is done with these color blocks where you can see literally the steps as the elevator goes up the book.

The second example was a book series called Brownie and Pearl about a kitten and a little girl. The opening line is “Brownie and Pearl are stepping out.” I knew from the rest of the script that they were going to a birthday party, so what is this opening illustration going to be? There is so much in that line. What does that mean for a little kid and her kitty to be “stepping out?” It’s fancy, right? They're wearing fancy clothes. The cat has a flower in her hair, and they're they got balloons and what’s a three-year-old look like when she steps out? She's got a little boa around her neck going to this birthday party. That was a lot of fun, because that's such a line that I would've never written. But Cynthia Rylant wrote it and she's such a master storyteller that she didn't give more information than that at all. It could be set in the country. It could be set in the city, but I'm thinking “A little girl in a city neighborhood going to a birthday party,” you know?  Finding words that evoke something either make the illustrator do something or help my own illustrations along. I'm a much stronger illustrator than writer; writing is always a challenge for me. But for a book like this, it's always fun to explore what are things the words can do that pictures can't or vice versa. I think I found the balance in this one.

MR: You had mentioned you found some stuff in older sketchbooks for the ideas for this new book and so obviously you keep sketchbooks. Do you go back to them when you're looking for an idea? Do you go back to them just generally when you're like, “Eh, I don't know what I want to do today.” How do sketchbooks work for you?

BB: So the first two options are both yes. The third option that you didn't mention is I sometimes will go through a sketchbook upon finishing it or even after doing the page and scan certain pages and drop 'em into the books folder on my laptop, which has about 50 folders. I'll title things that maybe I'll work on later. There's one called ‘Bernard Barnard,’ which was in fact Marc Weidenbaum’s title idea. How many years ago? 25. That idea's been sitting in that folder for 25 years over probably 15 different computers and two kids. Will it ever get written? I don't know. I don't know, but boy, I've got some ideas. I created a new folder this morning called “frog, stinkbug, and fish” because that's the manuscript I just wrote.

BB: That idea also came from a sketchbook from 2012 where I had just a list of names like lucky dog, cool cat, stink bug. Those to me evoke a little book about a cool cat or a lucky dog or a, a dirty dog or things like that. One was called bird songs and I just knew that list is absurd, but I think I got on Facebook and asked for more and people gave me names. So in this particular case that has been in the back of my head for years. I never forgot about the bird, lucky dog and all that, but it's a matter of kind of thinking “what is it?” Someday, I'm out on a bike ride or going for a run or just taking a shower and might go, “Oh!” This happened on Friday. I sat down and just started writing. You put a stink bug on a leaf, eating piece of fruit and a frog on the spot. What happens? So that's kind of where that idea comes from although the plan wasn't there. I keep scans of sketchbooks. I keep sketchbooks that are all dated. I use those little Moleskines. I've got about 20 of them all on a shelf going back about 16 years.

Sara Duke: What percentage of your sketchbooks are drawings and what percentage are text?

BB: ha ha. This is somebody who's obviously seen sketchbooks, because they're mostly grocery lists, or things I need to do today. It's probably 60% writing, 40% drawing, but the drawing is only 10% decent. A lot of times it's just a quick knockoff where I don't even know what I was doing, but every now and then there'll be a moment of inspiration. I'll get six or seven pages from these little tiny sketchbooks. Lately because of the analog work, I've been carrying this artist’s pad which is heavy, but I got deep into drawings, pencil drawings. I started doing these bird drawings for this book that that's coming out in December about a parrot and these are characters out of there where it's all pencil drawing. It's the most traditional looking book, but hey it's all drawings. I’m thinking about this novel / graphic novel, about an alien invasion and something goes wrong with the ecosystem. I've been drawing lately, these sorts of drawings with plants taking over. This kind of stems back to a trip I took with my wife to Mexico City. We were there in 2018 and that city looks like if everybody just walked away for a day or two, they'd come back and the whole city would be covered in plants. It's overgrown. People's patios with things hanging off of them, it's just the most beautiful thing. I've never seen anything like it. I told Sacha, “I feel there was like a village somewhere where this one guy, his job is to trim the vegetation, and if he goes on vacation, it just all takes over. We were thinking about that. That’s where this story's coming from as everything gets out of control, and grows haywire because of this alien. He's literally laying the groundwork for an invasion by his own people. His daughter happens to be the new girl in school and our main character Mickey falls for her, so he doesn't even recognize what's going on while her dad is doing all this. So that's the story. It's kind of a coming of age, 13-year-old story based on alien invasion.

MR: Can you tie it into climate change? Do you have a hook for your next book?

BB: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And COVID as well. In fact, I didn't know what the story looked like in my head until COVID and I started seeing playgrounds with police tape around them. People are wearing masks in stores. Remember in May of 2020, it was so weird to see people wear masks? And I was thinking, what do five-year-olds think of this? And now they're the ones most used to it of anybody.

SD: They don't remember before time.

BB: Yeah, they don't remember before that. So I’m just loving pencil drawings again, which goes back to the first things you draw with are pencils, and then you learn all these fancy tools. I’m going back to these pencils, but I have this. I carry this fancy thing around with me [showing a large rolled pencil case]; there's one of everything in here and I've got another one of colored pencils at the house. I've become a pencil nerd. I started with Blackwings about two or three years ago. I was at a gift shop in Frenchtown, New Jersey and found these Blackwing pencils and then Musgrave made in Tennessee right after that. And then these guys, this is a big lead hole [showing a big soft pencil lead] Look at that thing. I mean, I love it. It's so much fun to sketch with. That's where these drawings all begin -- real loose with this, and then I'll go in with the sharpen pencils and touch it all up. Yeah, those little sketchbooks are almost all text in some cases.

SD: I've seen sketchbooks and they're most always text. And I always wonder… I always walk around with a pencil. I'm a nub person.

BB: My notes app has become more text now. That's where a lot of my lists go -- in my notes app on my phone.

SD: I always wonder, because sketchbooks tend to be as much, if not more, text than pictures. Do artists still think in text first? Or do you think in pictures first?

BB: It depends on the thing. There's concepts and there's ideas and they sound like they're the same thing, but they're not always. A concept for a book would definitely be text, but then there's some places like this novel / graphic novel. I started writing a chapter the other day where I just knew that the crazy lady that lives next door, she's a trope, but she's gardening. Her character, we learn about her  through her own internal thinking, is she's mad at everything all the time, but that opens up this trope. The first third of the book, we're following Mickey, the main character. The point is, the idea for that chapter was words. But then there's one where we had a had a hurricane come through last September in Philly, Ida, I guess. The river I live near flooded and I was bicycling along the road. It's just raised up off the river, about three or four feet. As water had receded, it left a lot of water in this street. I saw this couple with garbage bins, collecting up turtles and gigantic carp and dumping them back into the river. They were probably 23, 24 years old. I stopped, immediately pulled out my sketchbook and drew my two main characters staring at this dying fish. Again, ecologically something's gone wrong and wrote a little text above it that said, “They knew they couldn't do anything. So they sat there like idiots and watched it die.” I think I wrote it in first person, “So we sat there like idiots and watched it die.” It's an evocative image. The text is important, but the sketch, that image…  there's a chapter right there. I don't know what that chapter is, but that's the chapter. So that was the other way, and it really depends. At the end of a book., it's going to be a little bit of both. I don't remember by the time this book My Hero was finished, I don't remember what started as text and what started as picture. I know her angry in the bathtub was an image, but before that I might have written “dream sequence bathtub.” Who knows? I don't have any recollection of that stuff. I wish I did. That's why I guess, sketchbook and notebooks exist. Right? So we all go back and dump them off on people to archive. It's hard sometimes, you know? Graphic novels sometimes will be like the Frederick and Eloise. It was a rainy day and seeing a corner block in Paris, I thought this look like a Jacques Tardi comic. It was right there, bang, there was a scene in a story I hadn't written yet. I went home and wrote the story. And so it just depends.

MR: You said you had a stock of Frederick and Eloise. Are you willing to sell it to people who read this far in the interview?

BB:  It's on my website. The book is on Amazon, but I can't imagine they have any in stock. I don't know how that would work because I don't know who they'd be buying them from. Fantagraphics doesn't have them and it’s the same with Dear Julia. I don't think it's in print anymore. About three years ago, somebody wrote me a letter and said she has all but number three of the Black Eye edition of Dear Julia. And so I sent her a copy of number three and she wanted to know how much I was like, “Are you kidding? You have three other ones. And this cost me nothing. Venmo me five bucks for the shipping, whatever. I don't care.” And that's why I'm not Elon Musk with Tesla money.

 One time somebody came to a Barnes and Noble, where I was doing a book signing and her son was getting one of the Tinyville Town books signed. And she had a stack of Frederick and Eloise and Dear Julia too, the Top Shelf and the Fantagraphics book. She says, “I couldn't believe you're the same Brian Biggs.” I replied, “I can't really believe it either.” Sometimes I wonder if I am, because those two books are from different lives. It's a different life. Those stories come from such different places, it's a strange thing sometimes.

MR: Any other questions? All right, it seems fitting to wrap it up on “It's a strange thing sometimes.”

 Here's more cats, trees, and alien climate invasions...