The Monsterologist

A Memoir in Rhyme 
Ghostwritten by Bobbi Katz 
Illustrated by Adam McCauley 
Sterling  2010  

A picture book collection of monster poems in the guise of a memoir of a monster hunter.  What's not to like? 

Every couple of years is seems we get a collection of ghoulish rhymes and monster-themed picture books, with one that stands out.  Off the top of my head the only recent one I can think of is Adam Rex's Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich, full of truly odd takes on classic movie monsters.  Bobbi Katz's The Mosterologist is this year's model.

There's little new one can say about classic monsters that hasn't been covered before except to couch them in unusual settings or framed within a larger context.  Here, Katz has "ghostwritten" a memoir of a monster hunter who records his exploits and descriptions in verse.  All the usual suspects are here: Medusa, Frankenstein's monster, Werewolves, a Kraken, but there are some lesser-knowns and a few newly minted monsters in the bunch as well.  Grendel and the Golem don't usually find as much coverage as they do here, "Bluebeard's Personal Ad" will probably fly over the heads of the kids, and the "International Zombie Survey" is a nice take on the current fascination with the living dead (it's a census form).  Making their debut are "The Verbivore" which has eaten the verbs out of a well-known macabre poem ("The Worms Crawl In"), "The Suds-Surfing Sock-Eater," and "The Compu-Monster," which are probably the two weakest poems in the bunch.

For the original monsters, perhaps the problem is that the poems have to explain what these monsters are where the other poems play of some passing familiarity of the subject.  Trolls, Count Dracula, and a cyclops show up in other stories and so don't require an explanation of what they do and why they're monsters.  Also, I have a hard time thinking of a sock eater or a verb eater as being as scary as Grendel's recipe for Danish Pastry (yes, using fresh Danes).

This is one handsome book, by the way.  The cover is embossed and designed to look like a quasi-old leather-bound book, the endpapers are facsimiles of postage stamps featuring various monsters, and the pages are collections of paper ephemera from the Monsterologist's collection with the poems laid out on them. McCauly's art is alternately loose for illustrations but at the same time the "artifacts" are well conceived and look plausible.  It's a nice mix and visually interesting without looking too cluttered or chaotic. 

So, yeah, I liked it. 

Richard Scarry's The Great Pie Robbery

and Other Mysteries
by Richard Scarry
The Great Pie Robbery 1969
The Supermarket Mystery 1969
The Great Steamboat Mystery 1975
reprinted by Sterling 2009

Sam Cat and Dudley Pig are detectives.
They find children who get lost.
They catch robbers who steal things.

Really, folks, that's as much as you need to know, that and the name Richard Scarry, and you're off. Sam and Dudley are as dingy a pair of anthropomorphic animal characters as Scarry has ever created. As with all Scarry animals, they bolt through scenes of mayhem and destruction (often of their own making) in their bumbling attempt to catch the criminals, bright-eyed and unblinking.

As any kid will tell you, with Richard Scarry books the devil is in the details. Small mouse creatures stand and stare at their antics like silent witnesses, stand-ins for young readers amazed and startled by the anarchy. A chase scene between the heroes and the villains runs through an intersection of vehicles and workers that invite comment and notation, each incidental character clearly in the middle of an adventure all their own. Incongruities abound, like a restaurant called "The Five Fingers" in a world where no humans are present, where a worm is seated at a table with a hammer, saw, and screwdriver for cutlery. This is Richard Scarry's world, and if you don't get it, kids do.

I was jazzed to receive this as a promotional gift from the publisher, in celebration of what would have been Scarry's 90th birthday. But just as excited as I was to delve into some prime Scarry moments I suddenly realized that there is such a thing as too much Richard Scarry. I can pour over long-form detailed graphic novels without noticing the time or day, but half way into the second story in this collection I felt fatigued with making note of Scarry's details.

This is probably the fault of my being an adult. All my years of reading, all my training, has been toward learning how to look at and notice things, first as an artist and then as a writer. I do not, and probably cannot, take in a picture book with the same fresh eyes as a child seeing the world new for the first time. I can't spend my preliterate days making sense of the story by looking at the pictures because I know the words. I can't go back and get new meaning with subsequent readings because I can take it in all at once now.

Except I can't take it all in at once, not all three stories at least, because it becomes too much information, it becomes Scarry Overload.

Also, I know that Richard Scarry's books often underwent revisions of political correctness over time – some ganders were changed so that men were sometimes in the kitchen and women were sometimes police officers – but I wasn't able to remember anything from the originals that had changed here. Did Dudley once had a Sherlock Holmes pipe? No clue. So as far as that's concerned it doesn't look like the originals were too messed up here.

Something that's also escaped me until now (the voids we discover sometimes!) is the likelihood that Richard Scarry's wife Patricia Murphy wrote most of his books, at least the ones with stories. This is noteworthy to me because if publishers are all for making sure that kids know understand gender equality, shouldn't she be getting some credit in these books? Perhaps on the title page?

Okay, maybe I don't have all my facts, and maybe she didn't mind, but it occurs to me that part of what makes a Richard Scarry book what it is comes down to the work he put into his illustrations to compensate for the fact that he was illustrating someone else's story. I don't go in for postmortem psychobibliographical revisionism, but an insecure illustrator whose earlier work was markedly different than his later work might have been making very busy pictures to compensate (or overcompensate) for inadequacies they may have felt in their storytelling.

Huh. Now I want to find out if there's some dark side to this man named Scarry.

How Big is the World?

by Britta Techentrup
Boxer Books UK / Sterling US 2007

Mole asks his papa "How big is the world?"
Papa replies "Why don't you go see?"

And out into the world little Mole goes. Mole asks all the creatures he encounters and they, in turn, answer according to their experience. Spider says the world extends to the end of his web, Mouse says it's to the end of his field, House says to the edge of the sea, and then when Mole gets to the sea he comes to a whale who takes him for a tour of the world, finally exclaiming that he doesn't really think the world has an end. Having seen all he can Mole decides he should probably return home.

"So how big is the world?" asks Papa.
"As big as you want it to be," says Mole.

I walked into this book a little cautious because the art feels a little muddled to me and because it was published by Sterling. I haven't seen much come out of Sterling that I've liked so I was a little surprised to not be totally put off by what I read. In fact, I sorta like this intrepid little Mole going out and finding answers for themselves.

Yes, exactly! Parents, adults, stop feeding kids answers and tell them to go explore the world for themselves. No, don't send your four-year-olds out on the backs of whales, but show them how and where (the library, the park, the basement, wherever) to find answers for themselves so that they learn from the start that the journey is part of the answer.

I'm still going to hold that this book could have been better illustrated -- everything felt a little stiff, stagy, a little block-y -- so definitely a library read.