Horror In Picture Books, by Pippa Goodhart

I have a new early reader picture book published this month, and it’s a ‘sort of’ retelling of a well-known tale. I say ‘sort of’ because it’s actually very very different from that well-known tale. Why? Because the original story is horrific! Working on adapting that story has set me thinking about which sorts of horror are, and aren’t, allowed in picture books.

            The story I was asked to write a simple version of was Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Little Mermaid’ story. Children love mermaids, especially little ones. They love Disney’s ‘Ariel’ story, based on Andersen’s tale. But the original story is very much about sex and temptation and damnation, and it is full of violence. The young woman Little Mermaid falls in love with a drowning prince whose life she saves. She wants to join the prince on land. So she goes to the Sea Witch who makes her a horrible offer. She will chop out the Little Mermaid’s tongue in exchange for giving her a pair of legs, and those legs and feet will always feel as if they are walking on sharp knives, and bleed. If the little mermaid can get the prince to marry her, she will attain a human soul, and go to Heaven when she dies. If not she will die and become sea foam. But the prince marries another. The Little Mermaid is dying, but her sisters save her with a new deal from the Sea Witch. The Little Mermaid will become a sea sprite instead of foam, and if she does good deeds for three hundred years she will then rise to The Kingdom of God. 

            Is that a pleasant story for young children to practice their reading skills on? No! So my story is about a child mermaid who wants to play with children on the beach. She chooses to have legs as her birthday wish, has a happy time with new friends, but decides she wants to go home to her own family, just in time before midnight when the legs would become permanent. 

            Which other classic stories have we changed to suit our modern sensibilities when rewriting those stories for very young children? No modern picture book version of the Cinderella story includes her sisters having their eyes pecked out by doves as happens in the Grimm brothers’ version of it. You won’t find picture books of the story of Noah’s Flood that include the people and animals drowning as God saves just those in the Ark.

            And yet we don’t always shy away from real horror of kinds much closer to home for young children. Think of award-winning powerful simple picture book ‘The Journey’ by Francesca Sanna. 

In that book we see the father going out into danger and not coming back. We see the mother in tears as she hurries with her children in search of safety. That safety isn’t sure for them even by the end of the book. It’s a book that is emotionally honest about war and killing and homelessness; what it is to be a refugee. But we don’t see the perpetrators of that death and destruction. 

Is the dividing line between what can, and can’t, be depicted in stories for young children the line between showing the violence and showing the aftermath of that violence? Should we judge differently between ‘real’ and clearly fictional horror in stories when deciding which horrors should, and shouldn’t, be included? Discuss….!   

Looking into the eyes of picture book characters.

Garry Parsons takes a closer look at how illustrators render the eyes of their characters.

 Julia Sarda from The Liszts written by Kyo Maclear.

Recent conversations about characters' eyes have left me in a spin. 

It’s clear that some people have a preference for how characters' eyes are rendered - and why wouldn’t they? You may have a preference yourself. You may prefer just dots, or you might prefer ovals with dots. 

This Is the Way to the Moon by M.Sasek

There are dots, then dots within circles, then circles with dashes, then ovals with dots, and ovals with dashes, then almonds with lids and lids with lashes and lashes with dots and a lot more variations too tricky to describe. But the closer I looked the more compelling it became. 

 But it is not only individuals who have preferences. 

Gentleman Jim by Raymond Briggs

Apparently, book markets across the world have differing collective preferences on how eyes should be rendered, some favouring dots, others preferring dots within circles, for example, which may leave you with a conundrum if you aim to sell your books in more than one country.  

The Journey by Francesca Sanna

We all know that the co-edition market is important for book sales and book longevity. And what a joy it is to receive copies of your work translated into Chinese, Estonian or Swedish! But does the shape of the eyes have an impact on what sells abroad? 

Emma Chichester Clark from Have You Ever Ever Ever? written by Colin McNaughton

Supposing we were to jot down a list of criteria for a picture book to generate enough interest to secure those vital sales abroad, how far down the list would the shape of the character’s eyes be?  

And if individual countries, or even continents, do have a preference, then couldn’t the sales team just tot up the figures and request that the illustrator give the character the eyes appropriate for the market they want to sell to?  

“Is that a half circle and a dash or would that be a dot with a lash for Scandinavia?” 
“No, wait - it’s dots for Japan and circles for South America, please!” 

 Angela Barrett from Anne Frank written by Josephine Poole

It seems that it’s not quite that simple to appeal to everyone, sell to the whole world and cover all the bases, but the conversations I was having seemed to imply that there might just be a happy medium to accommodate  a healthy majority (if not everyone) somewhere in between a half circle and a dash perhaps, something that could satisfy almost every cultural requirement. Can you supply the holy grail of character eyes that appeals to pretty much everyone, please, Illustrator? 

Garry Parsons from Hey! What's That Nasty Whiff? written by Julia Jarmen

So exactly what shaped eyes should you do? And does it really matter anyway? Surely the story and the overall feel of the book is way more important than such a small detail. After all, we are talking about something as simple as a dot or a dash.  

I’m back in a spin.

 The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss

Reaching for the bookshelves, I browse through the variety of eye shapes to look at techniques illustrators have employed at different times to convey the eyes of their characters. 

From the 1960s to the present day, the spectrum goes from the realistic to the wildly bizarre, but mostly, in essence, they are all variations on dots or dots within circles to some degree. 

David Roberts from Tyrannosaurus Drip written by Julia Donaldson

There are now lots of picture books spread all over the desk and floor. 

Within this pile of books I noted that some illustrators alternate between dots and circles from one book to another, not sticking to one method throughout their career, but moving back and forth and chopping and changing technique. In one book a character has dots, in the next the eyes have circles, and then in another book by the same hand we are back to dots again. I even surprised myself, when I noticed how my own characters have switched and swapped between dots, circles and half circles over time, too. 

Other Goose by J.Otto Seibold 

There are illustrators who use the same eye shape throughout a whole book for multiple characters, and some who vary this. In some books animal characters are adorned with the same eyes as the people they converse with, and in others they are not. Sometimes animals and make-believe characters are given distinctly different eyes to their human counterparts, and then in some, human characters have dots and their human companions have circles on the same page. Some characters appear to flick between the two (in the blink of an eye) with the eyes changing from dots to full round circles to express, shock, horror or delight and then returning to the mildness of dots again.

Bruce Ingman from The Runaway Dinner written by Allan Ahlberg

I hoped I might identify fashions or trends for eye shapes within this pile of books in front of me, but there were always contradictions and alternatives. Obviously my quick study has been confined to just one collection of books. I’ve not explored the archives of the British Library or studied the bookshelves of other countries, but one thing that is clear is that these eyes are not just dots, circles and dashes, seen in isolation. They have to be viewed as a whole. The rendering of the eyes is embedded in the nature of the character and within the style of the illustrator. To separate the eyes out from the rest of the whole now seems like a ludicrous notion. Would we then have to have a similar conversation about noses? A tick or a curve, a blob or a point...?

 Ingrid Godon from Hello, Sailor written by Andre Sollie

So, where to leave this ramble about eyes, be they dots or be they circles? Back in the place where picture books belong, I think. On a shelf where there are no rules and where the impossible can become possible through words and pictures combined. And where no one, it seems (even though we may try) can predict the ingredients of a worldwide bestseller.

 Sara Ogilvie from Detective Dog written by Julia Donaldson

So, if you find yourself feeling conflicted over a detail like dots or circles, maybe it’s best to forget whom you are trying to please and just let your characters decide for themselves.

                                      

     We're going to end on a quiz!  

      

     Can you identify who the illustrator is by the eyes alone?

     Answers will appear in the comments section on Tuesday evening. So there's no peeking!

Garry Parsons is a children's book illustrator.

See more of Garry's illustration here.
@icandrawdinos on Instagram & Twitter

                                                                                ***


                                                                               

How would you end this story? • Francesca Sanna (guest blogger)

The Picture Book Den welcomes guest blogger, Francesca Sanna. Her first picture book, The Journey, received wide acclaim and is endorsed by Amnesty International UK for reminding us that we all have the right to a safe place to live. Francesca's many awards include the 2017 Klaus Flugge Prize, which is presented to the year's most promising and exciting newcomer to children’s picture book illustration. 

In this blog post, Francesca talks about the debate surrounding the ending to The Journey.

My first book, The Journey, is the story of a family and of the journey they undertake when they realise their home is not a safe place anymore. As I briefly tried to explain in a note at the end of the book, it was inspired by many stories of many people I spoke with, from many different countries and backgrounds. A part of the research was even focused on historical documents about immigration in the early 1900. I didn’t want The Journey to be a specific story; I wanted it to convey the idea that everyone has to right to have a safe place to live. For this reason, in the book I try to give as little information as possible about where, or when, the story is set. 

The Journey by Francesca Sanna, Flying Eye Books 2016

A few months ago, during a reading with Year Two children in a school in London, a boy asked me, “How do you end a book that is inspired by a real story if that story is still going on?”

Questions are always a challenge, and I love the process of thinking about them and trying to come up with good answers – though I often fail – but I found this one particularly interesting. 
It made me think about another question I get asked quite often, mostly from adults: “Why does The Journey not have a proper ending?” The story I wrote does in fact have an ending, but it is a quite open one. The journey of the family we follow through the pages is not concluded in the usual way. Instead, the book ends leaving the family on their way to a new home, without showing any arrival, and this element has caused much discussion. Someone during a conference even told me I had cheated as I had gone against one of the main rules in children’s literature: a children’s book needs a happy ending. 

Journeying on the ferry, from The Journey by Francesca Sanna

A couple of years before I finished the book, I decided to do some research around the topic of immigration and in particular of refugees, because of what was happening (and sadly still is happening) in Italy, my home country, and in the rest of Europe.
 I was quite frustrated by having the same discussion over and over with people I knew, and by reading the comment sections of many posts on social media. In Italy the public opinion was – and still is – increasingly becoming more intolerant and turning against newcomers. When I first moved to study and work in other European countries (Germany first and then Switzerland) I saw that the same discussion and attitude was spreading there too. 

Border guard, from The Journey by Francesca Sann

I finished the illustrations for The Journey in May 2015, right before one of the worst moments of the refugee crisis in Europe. After that I was encouraged many times to change the ending of the story and to make the family finally arrive at their new home. I considered the idea and even tried some rough sketches of an ‘arrival’.

Finally, with the help of my publisher Flying Eye, I decided not to. Leaving the story open and the journey unfinished was, in my opinion, the best way to start a discussion on this topic with the children through a proper tool, a book, that gave to this discussion all the time and space needed. In this way I could give an ending to a story that still does not have one, leaving it open. 

Keep moving, from The Journey by Francesca Sanna

After the book was published, The Journey had its own journey. I had the wonderful opportunity to meet an incredible community of librarians, teachers, activists, and most importantly readers. I went around schools in different countries (Spain, Austria, UK, Italy, Germany and Switzerland) and saw the reaction to the book I wrote, discussing it with children and teachers.

Stories of escape, from The Journey by Francesca Sanna

The reactions to my open-and-maybe-not-so-happy ending were varied, as were the general responses to the book in every class and every school.
 Sometimes, when I read the story, I would finish reading the last lines and then I would have to say “and this was the last page of the book”. Normally this moment is followed by surprised gazes and a few whispered “What???”. Some of the children like the idea of different possible ways of ending the story on their own, while some hate the concept of a journey that does not reach the destination.

Migrating birds. Final image from The Journey by Francesca Sanna

Back at the beginning, my idea of a blank ending was more a symbolic idea, to leave to parents or teachers the space for a discussion with their children about what happens next. Later I took it more literally with workshops where children completed the story however they wanted. I'd read the story,  discussing some pages and the choices I made when writing and illustrating the story. Then I'd answer all their question until finally I'd ask them one question: how would you end the story?

“They buy a house and have a beautiful life!” An ending by Saphir, 7 years old

Drawing from a reading at the City Library of Geneva (Switzerland)
with children from Year 1 to Year 4

Further information
Amnesty International useful classroom resources on The Journey pdf 
The Klaus Flugge Prize
Francesca Sanna website