The Skeleton Pirate

by David Lucas
Candlewick Press 2012

The unbeaten Skeleton Pirate who refuses to accept defeat is beaten not once but twice in this quirky picture book.

The Skeleton Pirate knows one thing: that he will never be beaten, and will fight to the, uh, death to prove it. But when a band of pirates chains him up and throws him over board... he still will not accept defeat. rescued by a Mermaid he is free for but a moment when they are both swallowed by a whale. Still refusing to accept his plight the Mermaid has a plan to help them get out of the whale, which succeeds, and sends them both sailing into a golden sunset on a gold-filled ship made of gold, where the Skeleton Pirate looks into those Mermaiden eyes and accepts he has finally been beaten... by love!

While the title might sound on the scary side, younger readers aren't going to be put off by the stylized Skeleton Pirate Lucas has created. Looking for all the world like he might actually be made of balsa wood, he's so far from reality that no child would even consider asking the really big "adult" questions like: Why does he only wear pants? and; "If he's a skeleton, isn't he already dead?" and; "Why is he so cranky?" In truth, I missed the biggest clue of all on the title page where the Skeleton Pirate appears to be emerging from the wreckage of his own ship. Not to read too deeply here, the Skeleton Pirate is a lost soul doing the only thing he knew how to do until something (or rather, someone) came along to show him the truth.

Love beats fighting, any day.

Lucas is very crafty in not letting the romance show up until the final image and gives up a goofy tale in the process. Lucas has a thing for whales, and the sea, and this time around his watercolor palate feels much bolder. I'm a fan.

The Hero of Little Street

by Gregory Rogers  
Allen & Unwin, Austrailia 2009
Roaring Brook, US 2012

The Boy, who previously met the Bard and the Bear and battled a Midsummer Knight, takes "readers" on another adventure, this time through the world of Vermeer.

The Boy, out titular hero, is kicking around when a soccer ball appears. One swift kick and the ball lands in a fountain, and the bully boys who were previously playing with the ball are none too happy. They chase the Boy to take refuge in an art museum where he finds himself joined by a dog from one painting, helps a musician in another painting, and is let out into the world of Flemish masters through Vermeer's "Little Street." When his canine companion is taken from him the Boy tracks him down to a basement butchery where hundreds of dogs have been captured and caged. After making a daring escape the Boy and the dogs return to the "real" world where they meet up with the bully boys again. The Boy gets the last laugh as the newly freed dogs chase the bullies down as a favor to their new master, and the Boy continues on to another day and another adventure.  

click image to enlarge

That Rogers does all this without words in a comic-framed format is only half the marvel, his real strength comes in the ability to make the real and the fantasy imaginings slip fluidly in and out. When the dog slips out of Jan Van Eyck "The Arnolfini Wedding" the reader doesn't question it any more than the Boy does, it simply happened and is part of the world. As it is the world Roger's Boy inhabits has the feel of another time and place where time and technology play no part. It adds a sense of timelessness about the whole affair, a story of a boy and a chase and a series of adventures.

And it was while thinking about the story in this light that I realized this is where picture books are more liberal than their wordier counterparts up the literacy line. A picture book has the advantage of being like a short story where there may be a one-up change in the main character's position of predicament from the beginning of the story, but no need for there to be the sort of emotional or plot development necessary for traditional narratives.  I mean, I suppose I could find a three act narrative in The Hero of Little Street – act one: hero chased by bullies; act two: in the museum world; act three: return of the hero triumphant – but in the end it feels more like a cumulative series of adventures in the mode of the Odyssey. Four of five more of these Boy books by Rogers and they could be bundled together into an epic tale of their own.

you probably want to see this bigger, too

The last lingering element that was hard to place was Rogers visual language. It is a comic format but something keeps me from calling it a graphic novel. It isn't simply length, there's something that taps into something I couldn't place for a long time until I studied the poses of the characters, their lines of action while standing still, their contrapposto if you will. One thing computers haven't managed yet is the ability to search for sense connections beyond words, those memory senses of image and smell and touch that can't be entered as a search term. In the end I finally made the connection: Sergio Aragones, the "marginal" artist from MAD magazine whose linguine-legged people and wordless comics are echoed in Rogers' storytelling. The actual influence may not be there at all, but the fluidity of moving through these visual ideas is there, it's a shared vocabulary of images. I think if you know both artists works it's easy to see the connection, even if they are only distant cousins half a world apart.

As a final thought, based on a conversation I had yesterday, one of the great things about picture books like this without words is that it allows "readers" to provide their own dialog, their own interpretation of the story. It's malleable or it can become firmly fixed, but in keeping with the "picture worth a thousand words" Rogers books contain millions of words... but no text.

Tales from Outer Suburbia

written and illustrated
by Shaun Tan
Scholastic 2009

I've been wanting to write about this since before it came out. Life gets in the way, and books get shuffled further down piles, and suddenly a person finds themselves thinking "Wait, didn't I already review that?"

Following Tan previous books to these shores, The Arrival, I know there was a lot of anticipation over how Tan would follow-up his genre-bending stranger-in-a-strange land tale. Well the answer is that he did it by creating fifteen entirely new strange lands, or perhaps they're all an extension of the same strange land, but clearly this Outer Suburbia is proof that there are multiple world in his creative universe.

The problem with coming late to the review party is that it's difficult to find something to say that hasn't already been covered. Nonetheless, I'll give it a go and see what surfaces.

Tan's Outer Suburbia is a place where the unusual isn't. An over-sized water buffalo occupies and empty lot at the end of the street, silently dispensing advice with the point of his hoof. A pair of brothers set out to the edge of the map to see if, indeed, the world continued beyond what was on the page or if it dropped off into an abyss. In keeping up with the arms race the government places missiles in every citizen's backyard, for them to take care of, though over time they have become pizza ovens and tool sheds through disuse. It's a familiar world and alien at the same time, a place a little odd from the outside looking in. Then again, one culture's norms are another one's peculiarities, and so who are we to judge?

Sometimes this absurdity has its darker side. "The Undertow" appears to be another absurd story about the mysterious appearance of a dugong on a suburban lawn. As a rescue is underway the occupants of the house are too busy shouting at one another to notice the commotion outside at first. Only their son seems to know what the creature is, but no one can fathom how it got there. Once the dugong is rescued the neighborhood returns to normal. The parents in the house shouting and throwing things at one another fail to realize their sun has remained outside to lie on the lawn looking up at the starts, hoping his parents never realize he is outside yet waiting for their inevitable verbal abuse. Instead, the story ends with them coming out to silently carry their son back into the house.

I single out this story because, for me, this is the heart of this collection. Though I doubt this was Tan's intent, all these stories could be the fabrication of this one boy's imagination. His escape from his outer suburban nightmare is an inner retreat. True, many of these stories are too complicated to be part of the inner life of a boy who feels trapped in an abusive family situation, so then the story feels like an allegory of suburban angst, that displacement that allows people to accept the absurd as part of their daily lives. The stories we tell ourselves to remain calm and grounded, sometimes these are no less absurd than a foreign exchange student who looks to be extraterrestrial and is the size of a tea cup.

On a more practical level, Tan once again confuses me with his intended audience. This picture book has stories too long and too complex for most picture book readers, so I have to conclude that the book is intended for older readers who are not afraid to read a book with color illustrations on nearly every other page. In some ways this book is a throwback to another time, when the picture book was not limited to the beginning reader. I am thinking on my beloved copy of Dahl's The Magic Finger which was originally published in picture book format with illustrations but currently exists as a more conventional paperback intended for middle grade audiences. I always believed that the Dahl conversion was partly a concession to keep picture books "simple" and move the books with more story up as reading levels and abilities shrank. That is, the audience is being held back from more complex stories, and if Tan wasn't also the illustrator of this book I could totally see it sitting on the shelves with middle grade titles.

Unlike some illustrators whose picture books seem aimed at an adult audience, Tan's book is clearly meant to appeal to a younger reader. It is refreshing to see speculative fiction and fantasy done so well that it appears more literary, and Tan's visuals alternate between his unique pen and ink to a rich pastel and forced-perspective compositions that recount the work of artist Wayne Thibaud. It has the strange effect of quietly drawing attention to the quality and care of the presentation on all levels, and underscores just how weak and careless other picture books are in comparison.

Tales from Outer Suburbia reads like a modern The Twilight Zone for kids. That's a Rod Serling reference two days in a row, but what the heck. You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into...

Outer Suburbia

It's a gorgeous book, a haunting book, a playful book, the kind of book that invites repeat readings and delivers new insights as a reader gets older and becomes more experienced with the world.

The NYT "Best Illustrated Books" List, In a Word (or Three)

Obvious.

Perhaps it's even obvious to point out the the New York Times would pick the most obvious titles for its list, but what makes a book an obvious choice for its list might not actually be so obvious. I would say a good portion of the list includes books that for a number of reasons could be seen as obligatory, books either they couldn't ignore or in some other way felt obligated to include.


The Invention of Hugo Cabret, for example. Could they really afford to keep this book off the list if they wanted to? Nominated for the National Book Award (I thought it should have taken the award, but I'm telling myself it came in a close second) this book is one of those that demands attention and deserves it, so throwing it on the list makes sense. It's also either Caldecott or Newbery bound if it doesn't cancel itself out like an actor nominated for two different movies at the Academy awards. Wouldn't want to get caught not mentioning a book that could win something from the ALA, would they?

Also in the "can't ignore" category is Shaun Tan's The Arrival, that crazy picture book that thinks its a graphic novel. The story of the immigrant experience in a parallel Earth is one of those books many people might not "get" at first blush and will set it aside. A superb piece of storytelling my guess is that many who faithfully buy whatever the NYT tells them will get this and set it out on their coffee tables and wait until the movie is made to finally "read" it. "Oh, it's like Jumanmji"? a woman said to me when I tried to show it to her. Uh, no. Another piece of award bait if ever there was one and the NYT says its great so you should get it.

I'm going to put Not A Box in this category as well because once seen it becomes obvious that this is a wonderful book. The illustrations are simple and simply perfect. I think the book gets most of its points for executing a concept everyone instantly recognizes -- a box is whatever children imagine it to be -- and I know everyone whose seen it instantly wonders why it took so long for someone to execute it. From a standpoint of text this is an easy book to mess up, a horse made by committee if an editor had married the writer with the wrong artist. Without the text is this really one of the best illustrated books? It's hard to say once you've seen it. But I like it so I won't begrudge its place on the list.

Obligatory

Here's another word for the NYT list, and here we have many things that make the list because they are, for lack of a better way of putting it, New York-centric. If you are a good New Yorker you will own these books, and if you kowtow to all things New York then these are clearly "best illustrated" and don't you dare question it.

Every Friday felt, to me, a little empty. It celebrates that uniquely Big City idea of a father and son hanging out at a diner on Friday mornings before dad hops off to work and junior bops off to school. It also flogs a certain nostalgia for a time past (that might not have ever really existed) in New York's past when big city living was a romantic middle class notion. Does it hurt that author Yaccarino occasionally does illustrations for the New York Times? Absolutely not.

Guy Billout is another illustrator who's no stranger to New Yorkers, or readers of The New Yorker at the very least. This credential alone was probably enough to get him a book deal for a collection of very nice illustrations about a frog who decides to seek bluer waters called The Frog Who Wanted to See the Sea. Just rolls off the tongue doesn't it? The illustrations are, indeed, fine but they're the kind of sterile illustrations only a childless New Yorker would think a child could love. The story is as dead in the water as a red tide, rendering those cold, hard illustrations meaningless. But then, this is a list of best illustrated books, not best illustrated good books.

Another bit of New Yorker obligatory is Old Penn Station by William Low. Here we have the life and death of a beloved New York landmark, so beloved it no longer exists. Low uses his trademark nostalgic "warmth" to give the old rail station a second life, and in turn tells of a building whose lasting achievement may be that it forced New Yorkers to create a landmark preservation society. Nice message for the kids. Okay, there are books about landmarks, buildings and whatnot that no longer exist -- Brian Floca's excellent Lightship, a book that easily could have made this list but didn't -- but do they have to feel this stodgy? With it's steely blues, red-gold highlights and umber shadows this book resembles little more than an afternoon in an Old Gentleman's Cigar Club.

We also have a new sort of obligation that's taken over the list the last couple of years and that's the obligatory pop-up book. This year is no exception, though I take exception to a book that asks the "reader" to marvel at it's spectacle and count to 600. Yes, it's David A. Carter's 600 Black Dots and that's as much as it's about. If you're feeling obliged to include a pop-up book on the list -- and I suspect the NYT does so they can keep a chair warm for crap like Mommy? when the need for such obligations arise -- could it be a book with something actually going for it? Just last night a co-worker pointed out the new pop-up edition of Moby Dick retold and engineered by Sam Ita that clearly makes the precious emptiness of 600 Black Dots seem... uh, empty. Part of me wonders if pop-ups haven't developed to the point where they're no longer really for children, which would disqualify it from this category, but another part of me has serious questions about what constitutes illustration in this case. Comparing a book like 600 Black Dots to more traditional books is like comparing kinetic sculpture to painting. Best engineered, perhaps, but illustrated?

Peter Sis, much as I like his work and really like his latest book which has landed on the list, is another illustrator who has done editorial illustration for the NYT which I feel may bend things in his favor. The Wall is his story in picture book format, a retelling of growing up behind the Iron Curtain in the Czech Republic. With a couple of exceptions (the opening and closing image of young and old Peter Sis) the book is a fantastically accessible story of both one person and many as they struggled to come of age during an age (the 1960's) when the whole world was opening up to various forms of artistic expression. In mostly black and white line drawings with red accents Sis and his illustrations reflect an infectious optimism of spirit, quite a thing to do with little drawings in a book ostensibly for children.

Token

If I get a lot of shit for this, so be it, but I feel like the only reason Christopher Myers' Jaberwocky made the list is because Jerry Pinkney didn't have a noteworthy title this year. Am I saying what you think I'm saying? Yes. It's the 21st century and the publishing industry is still predominantly white and that's reflected in what gets published. It's a thorny issue that I'm not really looking to open up here except to say that Jaberwocky isn't that great of a book but it's what the NYT judges must have felt was the best they could put forth and not have the entire list look so damn white.

Personally, I don't happen to think the book is that good: it takes Lewis Carroll's verse and re-imagines the beast as a monster basketball player to be vanquished from the playground. I think what bothers me most are the textual assumptions Myers makes based on his research from Carroll's notes, suggesting that Carroll may have been incorporating Aztec words into his nonsense vocabulary and thus, tangentially, was using the poem to suggest more of a game than a combat. Carroll and Lear were both lovers of language, pure and nonsensical, and were not above appropriating words from other cultures that would sound like nonsense to the Victorian ear. I believe this passage from Carroll's own book makes the point

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'

The Jabberwock is not a basketball player. Sorry, that's Carroll's story and I'm sticking with it.

Okay, so does the race of the illustrator, or writer, or any artist matter? Should it? Absolutely not. But when a newspaper like the NYT prints out a list of the best illustrated books it might be just a tad wary of not being inclusive or of being accused of being the paper of record for only a certain segment of the population.

* * * * *

The only title I haven't addressed is First the Egg because I haven't had a chance to see it yet. It could end up being either and obvious or an obligatory, or it might just deserve to be on the list, I don't know.

So, if I were to make any substitutions to this list what would they be?

Instead of The Frog Who Wanted to Sea the Sea I propose that Close to the Wind by Peter Malone be considered. Here's a book that cruised under the radar earlier this year, a fictitious recreation of a young sailor's diary that explains the Beaufort Scale for grading wind conditions at sea, with some of the best illustrations of open water and sailing vessels I've seen in a spell. The perspectives alone easily beat out most of the books on this list, even the books I think deserve to be here.

While I do love Not a Box I'd much rather see Kevin Sherry's I'm the Biggest Thing in the Ocean get a nod. It takes childlike boasting to its logical conclusions in the sea as a squid discovers that perhaps it isn't what it thinks it is. The simple line drawings are equally cute and, honestly, it's funnier and has a better twist at the end.

I've already suggested a replacement for the pop-up book and Old Penn Station, but what about Every Friday? May I suggest Leaves by David Ezra Stein? Instead of father and son in the big city we get a yearling bear as she comes to terms with her first fall season. Stein's breezy watercolor illustrations have more warmth in them than any of Yaccarino's shades of yellow.

I think there's a danger involved anytime one puts together a list of anything "best." Perhaps the solution is as simple as changing the name of the list into something a little less elite. The Times reviews and recommends books all the time, so there has to be some way to separate out the creme de la creme. Perhaps they could use some bracketology with their monthly reviews and come down to a final 16 titles that readers could vote on. I'd like to see what sort of results came out of that compared to what The New York Times came up with.

Although, sadly, if people can't tell the difference between Jumanji and The Arrival than I guess it doesn't make much of a difference.