"Mars Needs Moms!" features your first fully digital "painted" artwork, and the color images have what looks like a lot of 3-D digital modeling in them -- they have a very specific "2007" look about them, in a way that the black-and-white line drawings on other pages don't. (And some of the characters and sets seem to have a hint of old Chuck Jones cartoons in their design.) How did you decide on your visual technique and style for this book?
This story popped forth in my mental scrapbook looking like a film ... which admittedly is my first love. I painted it as stills from a movie, which it's actually becoming. Watercolor and color pencils usually rule the realm of children's illustrations. The book I'm working on now will be drawn more conventionally. You still can't beat the weird verisimilitude of an elegantly drawn rough pencil line, though.
What were the picture books you liked best when you were a kid? Are your favorites different now that you've had two children of your own to read to?
To be honest, beyond the charms of Seuss' cartoons, children's books in the '60s weren't a depository of inspirational artwork. They had their charms ... but they rarely offered rich, graphic worlds that transported imaginations. Painters such as N.C. Wyeth would never have considered illustrating anything but adult novels. I wish he had. It took stumbling on a Chris Van Allsburg book when I was doing "Bloom County" in 1985 for the possibilities to occur to me. And indeed, this was when publishers discovered that the real way to sell lots of picture books ... was to make them just as captivating to look at for adults as children. This is revolutionary. It's the world that I could fit into.
What has having children taught you about creating a book that can worm its way into a 4-year-old's mind and heart?
A recent, instructive exchange with my son while reading the beta version of "Mars Needs Moms!" some months ago:
Me: "Then Milo pulled on his slippers and ran after the departing spaceship that held his captive mother..."
My son: Dad, where's the slippers? Look. He's got bare feet.
Me: He's got them shoved down his jammies. He'll put them on soon. Listen, the Martians have his mother. That's the important thing, right?
My son: Yep.
Me: So ... "Milo grabbed the spaceship's ladder and hung on as --"
My son: Are the slippers in his butt crack?
Lesson learned: If you write it, draw it. They should give me the Caldecott Medal just for embracing at least this bit of kid-lit orthodoxy.
"Mars Needs Moms!" is about the idea that parents love their children so much they'd die for them -- and that children don't often realize that. Do you think young kids might pick up that message from the book, or is it more meant to strike an emotional chord with the parents who read it to them?
Both. And it does, from the comments I get. Read the readers' reviews for the book at Amazon. The idea was to illustrate for a child that their perspective on their parents might have more than one dimension. Some kids get this intuitively. Others could use some illumination. But interestingly, adults are reviewing their own mothers -- or parents -- through the prism of the story ... and this is when they get emotional. For me, it didn't occur to me that my mother showed much love through sacrifice until I took a closer look at her life. Her style wasn't that of day-to-day hands-on affection. But she delayed ending a deeply unhappy marriage for at least 1- years until my sister and I were nearly adults. Ten years of frustration and depression was the foul Martian air she had to breathe after giving us the last space helmet. Oh, heck, that's probably what was in my mind when I wrote the story. I didn't marry a psychologist for nothing.
Next page: The daunting p.c. police of children's literature