Where art tells the story in "Bill the Boy Wonder"

One of my last steps in writing a picture book is to go through and pinpoint areas where I can cut text. Yes, that is a writing step. Because I’m not cutting meaning. I’m merely eliminating redundancy in instances where the art can show rather than the words tell.

Here are examples from Bill the Boy Wonder: The Secret Co-Creator of Batman.

The name of the pivotal character is revealed not in the text but rather in the picture. Yes, it is done with words, but the words are part of the art.

The text says that Bill sneaked his son Fred into the American Museum of Natural History, but doesn’t say how. This means readers must look to the art for the explanation, and kids especially love figuring it out.

“Fitting shape” is deliberately vague. It forces the eye to the picture where the impact is greater than if I’d simply stated that Fred arranged the ashes into a bat.

The cold open of Matthew Cordell’s picture book “hello! hello!”

In March 2011, I posted an explosive series that peeled back the curtain on the enigmatic process of picture book writers and artists. Well, it wasn’t exactly explosive. And maybe the process isn’t all that enigmatic. (But it was a series.)

One of the posts discussed the cold open, a device commonly seen in television. As an example, I showed the pre-title page sequence of The Enemy by Davide Cali and Serge Bloch.

That post prompted one author to introduce himself to another—and in an unexpected reversal, I was not the one doing the introducing. (In other words, I’ve been known to force myself, digitally speaking, upon fellow writers whose work I admire.)

The talented author/illustrator Matthew Cordell kindly let me know that he enjoyed the post, both by e-mail and by comment underneath it.

Six months later, Matthew e-mailed with fun news. “I'm working on final illustrations for a picture book that makes use of a delayed opening (my very first!). Inspired by your blog post and, of course, a personal fave, The Enemy.”

Flash forward a year, and hello! hello! is amassing raves and fans in equal stride. I take full credit.

Well, not exactly full credit, but partial credit. Actually, just a fraction of a square root of partial credit. Technically, that works out to no credit at all. 

In seriousness, I’m thrilled for Matthew on the success of the book. I asked him to reflect on the genesis of his cold open and he graciously obliged:

The idea of doing a cold opening in one of my picture books had not really occurred to me for some time even though I probably encountered this play in form with many favorite picture books. I guess it pretty much went unnoticed. I’d always gone with the typical approach: endsheets-copyright-title-story-endsheets.

Then one day I picked up what would become a favorite picture book, The Enemy by Davide Cali, illustrated by Serge Bloch. I’m a big fan of Bloch. The design of this book is very clever and sophisticated. And it uses a cold opening. It really became clear to me that this could be a cool thing to do.

Then I saw your blog post pointing out cold openings in some of your favorite pic books, and that pretty much sealed the deal. I had to do it. Some time later, my idea for hello! hello! came along and I knew this had to be the book to explore a cold opening. Early on, I had plans for weaving in many layers of subtle intricacies with the design of this book, so it was immediately obvious to me it could also benefit from this little tweak to the form.

I may be taking this a step too far, but perhaps this is why the book is named “hello” twice. The first “hello” kicks off the cold open, the second the story proper.

No, no?

Congrats, congrats, Matthew, and thanks for sharing a bit of your process.

12/15/24 addendum: I'll add other picture books with cold opens as I come across them [started this list after seeing others that I did not note at the time and now don’t remember]:

• The Truth About the Couch; written by Adam Rubin, illustrated by Liniers
• Simone; written by Viet Thanh Nguyen, illustrated by Millie Phan
• Bob the Vampire Snail by Andrea Zuill
• To See An Owl by Matthew Cordell
• Wolf in the Snow by Matthew Cordell
• Towed by Toad by Jashar Awan
• Giant Squid; written by Candace Fleming, illustrated by Eric Rohmann
• Honeybee; written by Candace Fleming, illustrated by Eric Rohmann
• Awe!; written by Chana Stiefel, illustrated by Susan Gal
• The Painter and the President; written by Sarah Albee, illustrated by Stacy Innerst
• The Night Gardener by the Fan Brothers
• Shark vs. Train; written by Chris Barton, illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld
• Little Red Gliding Hood; written by Tara Lazar, illustrated by Troy Cummings
• To Catch a Ghost by Rachel Michelle Wilson
• All Is Lost; written by Marc Tyler Nobleman, illustrated by

Picture book tips and tricks, part 5 of 5: Let the story breathe

Part 4.

In the term “picture book,” the “picture” comes first. Some argue the same should be true in the execution. Some have said that however long a picture book manuscript is, it’s always too long. There’s always a little more that can be cut to further demonstrate the economy of words.

Authors are sometimes afraid to let a wordless scene speak for itself. Fears: Will it seem out of place? Will the story lose momentum? Will my meaning be clear? Even if so, will smaller details be lost?

To that I say an emphatic no. A purely visual scene can have great impact and often approaches poetry without the usual tools of that trade (i.e. alpha-numeric language). Most such scenes that I can recall come toward the end of the book, and often are the climax itself.

Two of my favorites are from Green Eggs and Ham and Hubknuckles (one of my favorite ghost stories, period, and a rich name, too):

You have to learn the significance of this scene. So you have to read this book.

Before closing this series, I want to mention a picture book I recently discovered even though I don’t believe it uses any of the tricks I’ve discussed here. It’s called When I Am Old With You, and though technically nothing sad happens in the course of the book, it’s one of the most bittersweet picture book stories I’ve come across. In fact, if you're like me, you'll feel some of that bittersweetness from the title alone. I heartily recommend it.

In closing, and in honor of Dr. Seuss’s birthday today, I’ll end with what may be my single favorite picture book page to read aloud. For me, it begs to be read fast, until the last sentence, which I feel should be delivered with a dramatic pause after "tip."

(All book text and images shown in this series are copyright their respective creators.)

Picture book tips and tricks, part 4 of 5: Playing with the form

Part 3.

Many movies and TV shows employ a cold open—a short scene before the opening credits designed to draw you in immediately. I love when a picture book does, too. It adds urgency.

Here’s the cold open from The Enemy, a thoughtful, bold book that looks retro but reads as a product of the present day:

(The three cold open pages are actually halves of spreads, but for this purpose, I scanned only the half with the text.)

In a typical picture book image, each illustration equates to a single incident. However, exceptions exist.

To wit, consider The Luck of the Loch Ness Monster, a book that deftly combines humor, myth, a bit of suspense, a pinch of history (albeit twisted history), and, at its core, an unusual and touching friendship.

Look at this evocative spread:

Thanks to the kind Scott Magoon for voluntarily sending me this continuous image
to replace the shoddy scan-and-weld job I had here previously.

The left-hand page shows the protagonist (in red) and the right-hand page does, too, yet they are the same scene. A person can’t be in two places at once unless she’s a time traveler—or a picture book character. Yet the reader doesn’t feel anything is askew. This tweak to the laws of physics passes muster in a picture book. And, in this case, adds playfulness.

Some books play with form beyond the traditional boundaries of the narrative. The endearing The Curious Garden uses its endpapers to trace the dramatic arc of its story.

The inside front cover:

The inside back cover:

Without reading a word or seeing any other image or even a character, you get a sense of what this story will be about.

Sometimes it's not theme addressed on the "outskirts" of a picture book, but actual plot. The Bravest of Them All, a strong little adventure, pulls off a neat and quiet effect.

Here's the last page (showing it won't give away the details of the central set piece of the story):

This is the first the reader is learning of a "new" horse tank. And since this is the last page, you close the book figuring the fate of the old one won't be shown or explained.

Then you see the back cover:


That's the (obviously old) horse tank that has an important role earlier in the book; as noted above, the author did not explicitly state that it was a casualty of the climactic tornado.

Yet when processing the mention of a "new" horse tank with this final image, the reader makes meaning. (Of course, given that it's clear from the cover that the story is about a tornado, it's not hard to assume that lots of stuff would've been damaged. But still, it's a clever—and haunting—way of conveying information and leaving the reader with a reminder of the scary power of nature.)

Another example of playing with picture book form doesn’t involve the illustrations at all but rather their borders.

Take the real-life adventure The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, a triumph on multiple levels.

This acclaimed 2003 book commemorates the World Trade Center without directly addressing the tragedy of 9/11 (as I write this, the word “tragedy” seems as small to the event as we do to the towers themselves). That alone is a deft feat, yet the book manages to do it by featuring a criminal protagonist! “Criminal” is too strong a word here, of course, but Philippe Petit is not the traditional picture book role model figure. Or is he? His ambush tightrope performance was illegal, yes, but also daring, inspiring, and even unifying.

Back to the borders. Look how the book sets the mood using not just the images but the color of the commonly nondescript edges of the page.

The images themselves convey, respectively, “night” and “day,” and the coloring of the borders accentuates that. An argument can be made that Mordicai Gerstein’s art doesn’t actually end with his hand-drawn frames, but either way, the background of the background matters here.

Not only the color but also the size of borders can make a statement, as demonstrated in the timeless and wordless The Snowman.

The borders around the final panel (SPOILER ALERT!) of art are an emotional device. The boy is discovering his loss dominated by white all around (more snow?).

One’s first instinct might be to present this poignant scene as a full page, to emphasize the intensity of the boy’s sadness. However, I think it is much more powerful this way. The shrunken size of the panel signals that he now feels shrouded in loneliness.

I suspect my next observation has already been addressed in countless dissertations, so I’ll simply state it without analysis. In Where the Wild Things Are, the art starts off in a fairly small box, and the size of each subsequent box increases as the story moves Max closer to his fantastical encounters.




When in the land of the wild things, the art is pushing the boundaries, whether letterboxed or full-bleed.

Then when Max returns home, he is no longer boxed in artistically or spiritually.

(All book text and images shown in this series are copyright their respective creators.)

Part 5.

Picture book tips and tricks, part 3 of 5: Show, don’t tell

Part 2.

With picture books, the common writerly refrain of "show, don't tell" takes on literal meaning. One of my last editing stages with the books I write is to go through the manuscript looking for text I can cut because that info can instead be conveyed visually. Kids—we all—appreciate something more when we figure out what is going on; that’s the result of showing.

Take this scene from a childhood favorite of mine, Humbug Witch (SPOILER ALERT: If you don’t yet know this story, blur your vision and scroll down to the Puff, the Magic Dragon section):

I suspect if I were author Lorna Balian, I would’ve at first been tempted to accompany these cheerful images with a “She’s not a witch after all!” But then I'd hopefully remind myself to trust my audience. kids don’t need to read that because they see it, and the payoff, therefore, is greater.

Another example comes from the lusciously illustrated picture book adaptation of the beloved Peter, Paul, and Mary song "Puff, The Magic Dragon."

In this closing spread, we see the ageless Puff meeting a little girl with a man looking on.

With nary a clue in the text, we (adults and kids alike) can infer that the man is the now-grown little boy of the song/book, Jackie Paper, and the girl is his daughter.

Making this all the more noteworthy, the text also doesn’t indicate that there's been a jump in time from the previous spread and the man doesn’t necessarily look like the boy in a bigger body. Readers figure out who these two characters are almost by emotion, not deduction; we want Puff and Jackie to reunite, and here we learn (decades after the song) that—at least once—they did.

Oops, maybe that merited a SPOILER ALERT, too...

(All book text and images shown in this series are copyright their respective creators.)

Part 4.

Picture book tips and tricks, part 2 of 5: Timing is (still) everything

Part 1.

Like any narrative, a picture book must maintain a good pace. Yet in a picture book, this comes from not only the writing but also the breakdown of text.

Look at this sequence from the pinkredibly popular Pinkalicious:




Here’s another:



And now one from a favorite ghost story of mine, as well as one of the most fun picture books to read aloud, Three Little Ghosties:




Notice anything these three whimsical sequences have in common?

In each, the text breakdown foils the surprise! A reader turns the page and sees the pink, the red, and the boo before s/he reads about them. Therefore, by the time a reader gets to those moments in the text, they've lost some of their oomph.

(Actually, the nature of the impeded surprise in Three Little Ghosties is different—verbal, not visual. But the resulting feeling, for me, is the same. While reading this sequence aloud, I so wanted to synchronize the turning of the page with the shouting of the “Boo!” but a few other words were in the way.)

I feel these scenes would’ve been more effective if the text was repartitioned so that the first page/spread ended with an ellipsis and the first word on the following page/spread was, respectively, “pink,” “red,” and “boo.” I suspect that would've amped up the jolt of the humor. (By contrast, Pinkalicious nails it with its last page reveal, which I won't spoil here.)

The Milkman makes me nostalgic for an era I didn't live through in the first place. More on point here, it showed me that rhyming sentences/phrases do not need to appear on the same page. Before reading this wistful, lulling book, it never occurred to me that pace can override poetry!

 

In this case, it seems that the poetry was spaced that way to serve the art rather than to freewheel with the language. (In other words, the vignettes the the artist chose to depict dictated where to break up the text.) Interestingly, perhaps unintentionally, after these initial spreads, most other rhymes in the book appear intact on a page; the two exceptions are for effect, not art.

(All book text and images shown in this series are copyright their respective creators.)

Part 3.