Wild Things!

by Betsy Bird

  Rex should know. After growing up with the publication, he would go on to study in 1988 under Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of MAD, at New York City’s School of Visual Arts. Years later, Rex would take what he learned and apply it to the ultimate picture-book subversion: turning classics like Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny (both by Margaret Wise Brown) into the far kookier Goodnight Goon and The Runaway Mummy. “When I pitched Goodnight Goon to my editor Tim Travaglini,” he says, “I stated that it should be a tight parody, ‘like MAD would do.’” The results are appreciated both by die-hard Margaret Wise Brown fans and Those Who Positively Cannot Stand Those Soppy, Sickly Sweet, Sentimental Books.

  “Early on, MAD tagged advertising as fake,” Scieszka told Leonard Marcus in Funny Business: Conversations with Writers of Comedy (2009), adding that his profound disappointment in false advertising — and MAD’s expert parodies of it — were a turning point in his childhood. In fact, he recalls that years later, an Isuzu car ad and its smarmy salesman became the inspiration behind his 1989 tale of Alexander T. Wolf, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, which chronicles the innocent (or is he?) wolf’s attempts to prove that he was framed. He was simply borrowing a cup of sugar for Granny, you see, when a sneezing fit left him huffing and puffing. Illustrated by Lane Smith, who would become Scieszka’s longtime book-making partner, the picture book put the deviant duo on the map.

  Which brings us to a stinky man. A stinky cheese man, to be exact, of such unholy stench that there isn’t an animal alive that would desire to eat him.

  It’s difficult to exaggerate the importance of that lactose-based fairy-tale character and the groundbreaking book in which he stars. Scieszka’s The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, illustrated by Smith, came from Scieszka’s love of the ribald and absurd and his eccentric mental wanderings. He conjured up a set of fairy-tale satires, debuting in 1992, the likes of which the world had never seen, turning picture-book conventions on their heads and sometimes straight-up giving them the middle finger. Delighting hip school librarians across the nation with a book that made the parts-of-a-book lesson enjoyable for once, Scieszka kicked off the blissful madness before the title page even appeared — and with the Little Red Hen, with no introduction, giving Jack the Narrator some serious what-for. (“Who will help me draw a picture of the wheat?” she screams.) There’s an upside-down dedication page, not to mention a table of contents that appears at the end of the first tale, squashing Chicken Licken, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Loosey, Cocky Locky, and Foxy Loxy. (Yup, there’s one way to end a tale.)

  High on intertextuality, the book — a crazed send-up of the world’s most beloved fairy tales — was awarded a Caldecott Honor. Purveyors of parody and superstars of the subversive, Jon and Lane made it clear they were carrying a torch: “I am a great admirer of the school whose alumni include Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann, Remy Charlip, Peter F. Neumeyer, and Maurice Sendak — folks who really seem to know kids and what they like to read, not what they think they should read,” Lane Smith wrote. And when we asked him to take a stroll down memory lane, Smith recalled it this way:

  If memory serves, Jon wrote the first drafts of The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, the Stinky stories, and The Frog Prince, Continued all around the same time. (His best week ever.) He was sending them out and getting rejected. I had two books under my belt, so I agreed to take them around. At least I could get an appointment, as opposed to having to send them through the mail. I made up a dummy of True Story. Some folks almost bit. NO ONE cared much for the Stinky stories. Eventually, Regina Hayes at Viking took a chance on True Story. I called Jon: ‘I think I just sold the three-pigs manuscript!’ I said. (At the time, the story was called Tale of A. Wolf, and the dummy featured a big furry tail on the cover. Har, har). However, while Jon and I were celebrating our imminent publication, we could no longer get anyone at Viking to return our calls. Weeks went by. We thought they must’ve changed their minds, but eventually Jon got Regina to meet with us in person, and the rest, as A. Wolf would say, is history. After that book became a hit, Viking asked if we had anything else to show them. We gave them the very same Stinky stories they had earlier rejected. We told them we reworked them, and the reaction was, ‘Oh, yes. These are so much better now.’ Actually, we hadn’t changed a thing.

  Scieszka adds:

  The great mix of MAD magazine; The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show; and classic meta-fiction like Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, the work of Borges, Pynchon, and Barth absolutely made The Stinky Cheese Man — and pretty much the rest of my strange life as a writer of kids’ books — possible. And MAD shaped me in the deepest and most fundamental way. MAD started me laughing, but then quickly got me questioning mindless authority. Thank you, MAD, for getting me a C in sixth-grade religion class. But thanks also for inspiring me to wonder what might happen if the wolf got to tell his side of the “Three Little Pigs” fairy tale. What might happen if the little old lady ran out of gingerbread? What might happen if. . . if. . . if?

  The result was that Scieszka and Lane managed to have a similar effect on the next generation of kids that those MAD magazines had had on them, though without the same percentage of parental disapproval. Contemporary illustrator Adam Rex, who has illustrated everything from monster-based horror poetry (as in Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich) to books like Mac Barnett’s Guess Again! (2009), which intentionally subverts picture-book expectations, remembers it this way: “I was a teenager working in a chain bookstore when I came across The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (Scieszka and Smith), A Day with Wilbur Robinson (William Joyce), and later The Stinky Cheese Man (Scieszka and Smith again). At this point I was thinking the main focus of my life might be comics, as I loved drawing and I was beginning to love writing. Kids’ books weren’t on my radar at all. But then these aforementioned books (and others) showed me that below the dollhouse of children’s literature there was a semi-finished basement where people drew funny pictures and tried to crack each other up, and that there was maybe a space free on their orange, beer-stained sofa.”

  Violently Ever After

  Many fans of The Paper Bag Princess — budding, as well as fully bloomed, feminists — take pause when they discover that Robert Munsch, the author behind this altogether unsentimental story of a feisty young girl who won’t settle for less, is the same author of the syrup-sweet Love You Forever. The story of a well-groomed princess who sets off to save Prince Ronald after a fire-breathing dragon kidnaps him has achieved a cultlike status among fans all over the world, particularly women. As one New York Times writer once confessed, “I pass along paperback copies to my sisters and friends as if it were a subversive leaflet.”

  The sassy Elizabeth of the tale is based on a real-life girl. Munsch’s wife, who worked with her husband at a child-care center in Oregon in the early 1970s, heard him tell many impromptu dragon stories to the children but one day asked why the princess couldn’t save the prince. It was then that the story came to mind, and he later named the protagonist after a young child named Elizabeth who attended another preschool in Canada at which he worked. In a letter Munsch sent to Elizabeth when she was seven years old, he revealed that he wanted to have Princess Elizabeth punch Ronald in the nose at the end, going so far as to have the illustrator, Michael Martchenko, do a sketch of the assault and battery. However, the publisher didn’t allow it.

  A satisfying, if unused, original sketch for The Paper Bag Princess

  Image Credit 2

  SUBVERSION TODAY

  The Stinky Cheese Man might also be considered the grandfather of the early-twenty-first-century picture-book trend that Kirkus Reviews called in a recent review “the willfully amoral ending.” In 17 Things I’m Not Allowed to Do Anymore (2007) by Jenny Offill and illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, the young protagonist — who staples her brother’s hair to his pillow, shows Joey Whipple her underpants by cartwheeling on the playground, and tries to set his shoe on fire with a magnifying glass during math — never once trul
y apologizes for her delightful devilry. British author-illustrator William Bee clearly thinks that the tidy, moralistic ending is highly overrated, at least as evidenced by his bizarre picture books. In 2008’s Beware of the Frog, sweet little old Mrs. Collywobbles has only a little pet frog protecting her from the “big, dark, scary wood” adjacent to her home. The pet saves her from Greedy Goblin, Smelly Troll, and Giant Hungry Ogre by simply gobbling them up, and the elderly Mrs. Collywobbles is ultimately transformed into a sweet little old lady frog after a grateful kiss to her savior. Then she in turn, at the book’s final curtain, gobbles him right up. Followed by a huge belch.

  This would be simply unheard of in the late-nineteenth-century era of, say, Kate Greenaway. But it’s a new world. Says Italian author-illustrator Sergio Ruzzier, “In general, I think American children’s book publishers are too wary of sex, death, depression, open endings, and things that are not thoroughly explained. . . . I wish publishers were less afraid of disturbing the public morality. I don’t believe we need to protect children this way.” Sendak also addressed this issue, saying in 2009, “We are squeamish. We are Disney-fied. We don’t want children to suffer. But what do we do about the fact that they do? The trick is to turn that into art.” In 2012, author-illustrator Elisha Cooper bemoaned the many “infantilizing” children’s books he sees today, ones that talk down to children, adding that these books contain a lot of “shoulds, what you should do and what you should be. There should not be any ‘should’ in art.”

  Many of today’s picture-book illustrators, particularly those working in a primarily cartoon style of illustrating, are cross-overs from the world of animation. Perhaps we will see more deliberately amoral endings from these folks, given that SpongeBob SquarePants, like the writing in MAD magazine, isn’t typically spouting off truisms at the end of each episode.

  PLEASE DON’T EAT THE HERO

  Both Adam and Michael Rex and those of their ilk represent a whole new world of subversive children’s literature. The current crop of children’s book creators don’t have to abide by many of the old rules. Picture books today delight in the postmodern (Black and White by David Macaulay); kill off the protagonist midway through the tale (Arlene Sardine by Chris Raschka); break down fourth walls (The Three Pigs by David Wiesner); upset our expectations (Scribble by Deborah Freedman); and even poke fun at old classics (Rex’s Goodnight Goon and The Runaway Mummy).

  And sometimes the hero gets eaten.

  Yes, dear old Mrs. Collywobbles’s frog isn’t the only one. He wasn’t even the first. Sendak’s Pierre from 1962 saw to that. Really, he’s just another victim of one of the odder picture-book themes of the new millennium. We are talking about the devouring of the protagonist. If the naughty protagonist is a stand-in for the child reader, what is that reader to make of a book where such a character gets consumed for his or her sins? In a lot of ways, the digestion (or, at the very least, the swallowing) of a hero is a throwback to the old days of children’s books as morality plays. The sinful character who displays pride or foolishness is, in a moment of weakness, finding himself halfway down the gullet of his adversary. Says illustrator Kelly Murphy, who engaged in her own “children’s book carnage” by depicting dragons eating villagers in Boni Ashburn’s 2008 book, Hush, Little Dragon (which one reviewer called “Sweeney Todd for the sandbox set”), “I don’t think this sort of story is a new thing. Many of the older fables and fairy tales revolved around a ‘watch out and take care, or you just might get dead’ story. . . . Even at an early age, I think it’s very obvious in nature and easy to understand how dangerous life can be.”

  In Kara LaReau’s wickedly humorous Ugly Fish (2006), illustrated by Scott Magoon, we have the ultimate cautionary tale for the bullies of the world: Ugly Fish, the aquarium oppressor who is most certainly not hip to sharing with others, chases and then eats all the other fish with whom he is expected to share his space. Suddenly finding himself alone, he wishes for someone with whom to pal around after all. Cue huge, shark-like Shiny Fish. After Ugly Fish shows him around the tank, Shiny Fish decides he wants it all to himself and promptly has Ugly Fish for a snack, followed by. . . hey! Another huge belch. Says Adrienne Furness, blogger and director of the Henrietta Public Library near Rochester, New York, “I think the current tendency is to support children’s self-esteem to a point that is almost crippling when they come up against people who will inevitably be bigger or smarter or quicker or funnier. We are all unique, but these books recognize limits, and why not do it like these books do — with a sense of humor?”

  But why do they do it? Is it just to shock the reader, or is there some justification behind these books? Death in children’s literature certainly makes many parents squirm. Could it have something to do with the notion of children needing protection from the vagaries of life? Perhaps. Parents want to be those protectors. But in the past several decades, whether parents like it or not, children’s and young adult literature has gone out of its way to reflect the notion that the world isn’t always a safe place — even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when that fact became abundantly clear.

  I’m Being Swallowed by a Boa Constrictor

  After the publication of Charlotte’s Web, many librarians, teachers, and parents objected to the inclusion of death in a novel for children. These are the folks E. B. White likely had on his mind when he wrote to his editor, Ursula Nordstrom, “I am working on a new book about a boa constrictor and a litter of hyenas. The boa constrictor swallows the babies one by one, and the mother hyena dies laughing.”

  When asked, most authors and illustrators feel inclined to place their books within the context of childhood itself. Says author-illustrator Polly Dunbar, who believes that lunching on the protagonist is a wonderful way of getting your comeuppance or learning a lesson, “Children’s stories need to prepare children for life. OK, we hope not to get eaten in real life, but everything isn’t soft and cute, either.” Emily Gravett, author-illustrator of the book Wolves, in which the cuddly little carrot-lover is consumed (unless you believe the “happy ending” tacked on at the end), notes that “I think we are more sensitive about these things than we used to be. . . . Look at Beatrix Potter! Wasn’t Peter Rabbit’s father put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor?” Kara LaReau agrees: “I think children (and readers of all ages, really) want a story that’s truthful, and the truth is that the world isn’t always about the cute and cuddly and the happily-ever-after. It’s becoming more and more difficult to hide the complexities of our world from children, especially given the state of things these days. . . . I think it can be comforting, in a way, for them to see stories that reflect life’s adversities and show how we might find humor in them.” Scott Magoon, whose paintbrush brought the one-and-only Ugly Fish to life, adds, “It’s ready-made conflict — animals really do eat animals, and, if presented correctly, these tropes can be used to reflect our own struggles as human beings: it’s fair game, so to speak. To be honest, I’m surprised there haven’t been more of these protagonist-gets-eaten tales. Surely the recent batch is not the first. . . . Maybe we’re seeing the visceral result of those wild-nature shows we were forced to watch as kids on PBS?”

  Note a theme here? It’s interesting that many of the so-called subversive books aim to instruct as well. In that light, Struwwelpeter is to morality tales what The Stinky Cheese Man is to standard fairy tales and fables. They are both subversive stories and morality tales at the same time. Both play along with the pre-existing genres, then subvert them by taking their stories to ludicrous, impossible extremes. Struwwelpeter used didactic conventions to simultaneously undermine and reinforce their messages. Similarly, The Stinky Cheese Man both subverts and drives home fairy-tale conventions by sabotaging them every step of the way. Such subversive books are mocking the “shoulds” of art, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions.

  Pierre’s Progeny: Recent Books in Which the Protagonist Gets Eaten

  • Polly Dunbar’s Penguin. In which we learn to never be
loud around blue lions.

  • Mini Grey’s Ginger Bear. Our brave protagonist barely survives a late-night cookie massacre at the hands of Bongo the Dog. But — ouch! — his friends don’t.

  • Tadpole’s Promise by Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross. Ah, the consumption of first love.

  • Kevin Sherry’s I’m the Biggest Thing in the Ocean! In which we learn that the cheery hubris of a squid is very similar to that of a three-year-old. Even in the belly of a whale.

  • The Book That Eats People by John Perry and Mark Fearing. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the library. . .

  • Brock Cole’s Good Enough to Eat. No worries: the clever protagonist cuts her way out of an ogre. With a sword. Attagirl.

  • Giant Meatball by Robert Weinstock. Dark humor at its pinkest.

  • Princess Justina Albertina by Ellen Dee Davidson and Michael Chesworth. Spoiled brat gets put in her place by surly gryphon. And that place would be his digestive tract.

  • I Want My Hat Back and This Is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen. In which the author-illustrator leaves it a tantalizing mystery as to whether or not the characters get eaten, but we know one thing: stealing may be bad, but the crime of stealing hats is so atrocious, nay, unforgiveable, that you should not complain if you are devoured for your sins.

  THE KIDS ARE OK

  Which brings us back to good old Struwwelpeter, the boy with the unkempt hair. Author-illustrator Bob Staake’s first encounter with the eponymous character was when his parents immigrated to the U.S. from Germany after the war. This little book of lopped-off digits and homicidal rabbits left its impression on the young Staake mind. Bob grew up, mastered the art of illustration, and, after a stint at MAD magazine, at last came to the point where publishers were offering him the chance to make the best use of his own ideas. Fantagraphics, for one, asked if there had ever been a book he wanted to do that a traditional publisher (such as Random House; Little, Brown; Simon & Schuster; and their ilk) would balk at. Without missing a beat, Bob knew what he wanted to do: a modern interpretation of Struwwelpeter. Amazingly, Fantagraphics went for it.