AH ha ha ha! Now I have ALL THE GIRAFFES!

It's Like Looking In a Dead Pottery Mirror

Tucson artist Vicki Lazaro made a raku ware calavera mask of me in exchange for a visit to her son's school.  I do not, to be clear, usually make out this well on school visits.

An Open Letter to the Mother Who Thinks One of My Monster Poems is Inappropriate for Children

(I received an email from the mother in question a few days ago.  She was kind enough to tell me she and her 8-year-old liked my book Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich, but that the whole family was shocked and disappointed by the opening line from the mummy poem.  The opening lines are: "There's a place in France where the naked ladies dance./ But when King Tut died, he wore bandages for pants."  What follows is my response to her email.)

Letters like yours are always distressing.  It's never been my intention to offend parents or introduce children to any material I believe is inappropriate to their age.  Of course there will always be spirited disagreement about just what is appropriate for children and what is not, and so here we are.

Why did I include the bit about the naked ladies in my poem?  It was my intent with the mummy poem to craft something that would be understood to be read to a particular tune, in much the same way as the Phantom poems are in the same volume.  When we take a cartoonish view of ancient Egypt we often think of a song that's familiar to nearly all Americans, even if most of us are unfamiliar with its actual title and history: "The Streets of Cairo, or The Poor Little Country Maid."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Streets_of_Cairo,_or_the_Poor_Little_Country_Maid

Of course, children everywhere have been singing this song to one another for decades with the schoolyard lyrics, "There's a place in France where the naked ladies dance, there's a hole in the wall where the boys can see it all," etc.  I can't know if your son was familiar with this, of course.  Maybe you weren't either, though I certainly knew it thirty years ago, when I was eight.  My wife tells me that she sang it as a little girl as well.

Regardless, my early drafts of the mummy poem didn't contain that line about the naked ladies.  But I discovered that readers were not intuitively realizing that they should be reading it to the "Streets of Cairo" tune, so I rewrote it with that first line from the playground standard.

I respectfully disagree that the line is inappropriate for school-aged kids, but I don't expect to change your mind.  I take no pleasure, anyway, from learning that it bothered your son.  But I hope you understand that I had an editor on this book, and that editor had a boss, and that boss had a boss.  Likewise the publisher had a sales and marketing team that shared the book with hundreds of teachers and librarians before its publication.  The poem was published as is because none of these people voiced any objections.  Indeed, the book has been available for over five years, and this is the first objection to it I've received.

None of this means you're wrong, of course.  You're certainly not wrong about the care and raising of your own son.  But I want you to understand that there was nothing careless or cavalier about the years-long process of writing and producing Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich.  I hope you'll continue to enjoy it with your son, and to paperclip together the pages of the mummy poem until you return it to your library.

Best Wishes,

Adam

J.Lo, Painted

Recent painting of that recent drawing of J.Lo I posted earlier.

The Review I've Been Waiting For

I mean, Kirkus gave Cold Cereal a star and everything, but Your Neighborhood Librarian at the blog Pink Me gets me:

http://pinkme.typepad.com/pink-me/2012/01/cold-cereal-by-adam-rex-review.html

Oh Yeah, I Have a Blog.

So here's a recent drawing of J.Lo from The True Meaning of Smekday.

Perfectum Muralis

Finished.

Previous work in progress post here.

Horn Book Review of Cold Cereal

Another nice review of my forthcoming novel Cold Cereal came to my inbox today. From the Horn Book:

 "Rex takes his time mounting his preposterous edifice of a plot, but reader interest and suspension of disbelief never flag in this humorous, consistently entertaining, well-spun yarn." 

 Preposterous edifice of a plot. That sounds about right.

 Here's another illustration from CC. Regular visitors to my blog will be able to discern all the important plot points from these images, and will have no need to read the book.

Star for Cold Cereal

I craved little gold stars when I was a kid, and apparently not much has changed. Kirkus reviews recently gave a starred review to my next novel, Cold Cereal (coming Feb. 7th), and if they saw fit to send me an actual star in the mail I'd stick it right on my Trapper Keeper.

Kirkus said that

The author tucks in portrait illustrations and hilariously odd TV-commercial storyboards, along with a hooded Secret Society, figures from Arthurian legend, magical spells and potions, a certain amount of violence, many wonderful throwaway lines (“Yeh may have a tarnished glamour about yeh, sure. Like a celebrity’s daughter.”) and tests of character with often surprising outcomes.

I think their classification of the pictures in Cold Cereal as "portrait illustrations" may have something to do with the character of those few images that were actually on display in the Advance Reader Edition. I'm afraid most of the illustrations were missing then. But I got the picture above done in time to include it. From the book:

He steered toward the local park, down the storm drain shortcut he’d discovered yesterday, dodging broken glass and a man with a rabbit head, up the embankment, toward the gap in the fence and was that a man with a rabbit head? Scott braked hard, grinding a black snaking skid behind him. The rabbit-man stopped, too, and looked back. Its tweed pants and white dress shirt were creased and dirty. Its necktie was askew. Its rabbit head was a rabbit head.

And, by way of signing off, here's a picture of two men dressed as a unicorn.

Mural!

Last weekend I started on a mural overlooking our pool, based on an illustration from BILLY TWITTERS AND HIS BLUE WHALE PROBLEM. An illustration that is available as a t-shirt design in the Zazzle sidebar on this blog. (cough)

Here's the wall "before." The pool didn't actually have to be green to get this process started, but I found the brackish smell and the heady vapors of a hundred dollars worth of algaecide put me in the seafaring mood.

My wife, seen here, had an idea that may seem like old hat to regular mural-painters, but which I found ingenious: tape the design up in sixty or so pieces, then take one piece down at a time and reproduce it in paint underneath. That way I can look at the enlarged design on paper in my hand, and the surrounding paper pieces will guide my lines and ensure everything connects. Like those grid-drawings everyone did when they were younger.

This is as far as I got in one afternoon. Should take another to finish up–I'll post the whole wall when it's done.

The Fraternal Order of Fingerhats

Shared by Heather Alexander of Dial Books.

Halloween Costume WIP

More Brixton Brother Art

This one was tricky. The original sketch for it looked terrible, 'cause I hadn't any photo reference for it. If I can find it I'll post it later. The photo reference is fun in and of itself–me in a fluffy bathrobe lying prone of a chaise in the backyard.



Anyway, the question of why Steve Brixton is in a bathrobe atop a moving train is best answered by reading the book, WHICH IS AVAILABLE NOW.

UPDATE: Due to popular demand (2 comments), here's my first attempt at a sketch, with no reference at all. I think this got approved, but I'd always promised to fix the dodgy drawing after shooting some photo reference.



Lacking a train and a 12-year-old boy, I put on my wife's robe (it actually has "Dr. Rex" stitched on the front–very hot) and lounged on a chaise.

Additional Fingerhat Update

From Brooke Boynton Hughes:

New Brixton Bros. Releases Tomorrow

October 4th is the official release date for Mac Barnett's Brixton Brothers #3: It Happened on a Train. So here's another look at one of my interior illustrations–a masked goon and potential car thief.

The sketch:



And the finished illustration:

IMPORTANT FINGERHAT UPDATE

My agent apparently couldn't resist yesterday's little cut-paper activity, and can be seen here attempting to open negotiations with the leader of the Cat Planet.

If anyone else sends me fingerhat pictures they're going right up here.

FINGERHATS!

Previously I posted an illustration of Abraham Lincoln fighting an octopus on the moon that ran in an installment of the syndicated newspaper feature, THE GOODS. (Follow that link and scroll down to read one commenter's critique of President Lincoln and tacit approval of slavery as "peaceful." It's a stitch!)

Anyhoo, here's a more recent issue of THE GOODS showcasing, among other things, fine finger haberdashery. And also Lincoln again. Because I only have five or six separate ideas in my head.

Auction!

A piece of original SMEKDAY art is being auctioned off for Banned Books Week: http://myworld.ebay.com/abffe



Only $10.50 right now!

Vacation

Vacation means you get to draw the Hulk in your sketchbook while the plane is landing into the Anchorage airport and no one can tell you, “Get back to painting panda bears.”

I know that doesn’t sound like much of a distinction but it meant a lot to me at the time.


(Disposable Bic pen and green Sharpie)

I’m in Alaska. My wife and I are taking a cruise with my parents, and right now we’re in the midst of a land tour. Today we passed through Wasilla and saw Sarah Palin’s old house. It’s a Lincoln-Loggy sort of place and not really the castle of frozen tears I was expecting.

Here’s an impromptu drawing of my mom, for which she will probably not be terribly grateful.



My mom is encouraged to remember that this was drawn in pen on a rattling motor-coach and that I was very tired.

This just in: My Artwork is Still Fine.

From the Kirkus review of IT HAPPENED ON A TRAIN:

Kid gumshoe Steve Brixton (who actually doesn’t have a brother, he just picked the name because it mirrors his beloved Bailey Brothers detective stories) has, at the ripe old age of 12, retired from the detecting game. He became disenchanted upon discovering, during his last adventure (Ghostwriter Secret, 2010), that the author of those inspiring books was actually a criminal mastermind. So Steve’s given up his agency, and now his best chum Dana is spending entirely too much time with Other Dana, his girlfriend. Little does Steve know that signing up for the Model U.N. with Dana and Other Dana will place him on a train rocketing toward detecting destiny! When meeting a mysterious young lady onboard gets Steve invited into the mysterious last car on the Sunset Coastliner, Steve and Dana (but not Other Dana) find themselves invited to protect Mr. Vanderdraak’s new, vintage motor car from serial car thieves! Can Steve solve the case? More importantly, can he go more than five minutes without getting trapped somewhere? Barnett’s sly and often silly Hardy Boy parody chugs along with plenty of laughs and enough honest-to-gosh mystery to please any lover of boy detective fiction. Rex’s black-and-white pencils (which also parody the Hardy tales) are still a fine match for the goofiness.

Here's one of those "pencils" which continues to be perfectly adequate:



This is actually, of course, a pretty nice review from a notoriously demanding publication. Happiness just isn't as much fun to blog about.

All Will Be Revealed.

I was recently emailed two questions by a reader of my picture book, TREE RING CIRCUS. I present these below, with their answers, as a service to other readers who may have similar concerns.

1. When the tree first appears it is MISSING! A branch. How did the branch get cut off before the tree appeared?
2. After we first see the chicken he is not in the tree. He is in the next view of the tree. Where was he?

The missing branch was removed between the pages by pirates who all needed new legs. Some people tell me that if you look very closely you can see the pirates but I think these people are lying.

The chicken is obviously also hanging out with the pirates.

Also, chickens are girls.

Further questions can be directed to adamrex(at)earthlink(dot)net.

Get Antsy When I Haven't Posted Any Art in a While.

So here's some. A preview image from my next novel, COLD CEREAL.

Rescued a Some Kind of Scarab Beetle Out of My Pool Today.

Surely now Lord Anubis will let me into the afterlife.

And People Wonder Why I Don't Read My Reviews...

Behold the first masterpiece of Amazon customer criticism. Then go ahead and order the book she feels so strongly about, WILDWOOD by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis. Maybe from your favorite indie bookshop?

There Was a Lot of Pepper Dust in the Air...

Slightly dodgy photo of first finished spread from forthcoming picture book with Neil Gaiman. Click to enlarge.