The counterpoint of pictures and words

Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Here is a page from my pocket notebook of Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen discussing a new picture-book version of “Hansel and Gretel,” which was made by Stephen King adding words to Maurice Sendak’s designs for an opera.

JON: I’d say the illustrator is in the business of reacting to the text, doing work the manuscript doesn’t do. This can mean providing new information, adding a different tone or even subverting the words a little.

MAC: It’s this fluid, playful dynamic between text and image that animates the art form. As Sendak himself put it, the picture book is “an ingenious juxtaposition of picture and word, a counterpoint. … Words are left out — but the picture says it. Pictures are left out — but the word says it.”

That Sendak quote is from his praise for Randolph Caldecott:

Caldecott’s work heralds the beginning of the modern picture book. He devised an ingenious juxtaposition of picture and word, a counterpoint that had never happened before. Words are left out – but the picture says it. Pictures are left out – but the word says it. In short, it is the invention of the picture book.

I fixated on Sendak’s use of the word “counterpoint,” because I sort of remembered him being a classical music geek. (I remembered correctly.)

In another interview, Sendak explained his counterpoint idea in a little more detail:

I think what happens is if you’ve got enough confidence in yourself and you’ve resolved the text, that the pictures then do a second story, not be a mere echo. “Jane walked into the room and was eaten by the plant.” You don’t need to draw that, although maybe you’d like to draw that. But, in fact, you should draw something else. There should be a counterpoint between your pictures and your text. The best-illustrated books are the books where the text does one thing and the pictures say something just a little off-center of the language, so they’re both doing something. Otherwise you have an echo chamber. The most boring books are where the pictures are restating the text.

Who needs that? The text said it much better. So you cannot separate the pictures from the text, you shouldn’t be able to, not in a well-constructed book. They should fit in like machinery.

Because music is really my first love, I am always looking for musical metaphors to help me conceptualize my writing better.

A footnote: This morning I heard R.E.M.’s “It’s The End of the World As We Know It,” and I was thinking about how much I like Mike Mills’ backing vocal response to the main chorus line. (“It’s time I had some time alone.”) It reminded me of The Beatles’ “Getting Better,” how Paul McCartney’s “Got to admit it’s getting better / a little better / all the time” was answered by John Lennon’s sardonic backing vocal, “It couldn’t get no worse!” It’s not technically musical counterpoint, I don’t think, but it’s interplay between voices that deepens the work.

The inspiration for Tomi Ungerer’s The Three Robbers

Thursday, June 10, 2021

Tomi Ungerer’s The Three Robbers is one of my favorite picture books, so it was awesome to read about how he came up with it in his treasury:

I found one of those old German printings sheets called Münchener Bilderbogen — they were the equivalent of a comic strip in the 1890s. There was a a story in there with a picture of three robbers. They inspired my story, which developed as I started drawing. So I must say that originally those three robbers were not my idea. Original ideas can always be traced back to something. We are all influenced by something, and then we translate it and transpose it into something else.

Emphasis mine. (Steal like an artist.)

Cécile Boulaire, assistant professor in children’s literature at Université de Tours, tracked down the original sheet Ungerer was talking about:

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of a page from the book with a panel from the sheet:

And a close-up of the original robbers:

In praise of James Marshall

Monday, April 2, 2018

In The New York Times this week novelist Amy Bloom has a piece, “For the Love of ‘George and Martha,’” praising the stories of the hippo duo created by the under-appreciated picture book genius James Marshall. George and Martha are my absolute favorite books to read to my boys — if I know you and you have a baby, I will probably gift you George and Martha: The Complete Stories of Two Best Friends Collector’s Edition. (Although, personally, I prefer the self-contained individual paperback editions.)

I am all for any praise for James Marshall, but there’s one thing that Bloom got wrong: she writes, “He hated Texas.” Now, I’m not one to defend Texas, even though I’ve lived here for over a decade, but this is false. He was actually very fond of Texas, especially west Texas and his hometown of San Antonio. (He was born across the street from The Alamo.) “[M]y roots are there,” he said. “I like the climate.” What he hated was Beaumont, Texas — in his words, “a swamp” — the town he had to move to in the middle of high school when his father got a job there.

In fact, if you pay close attention to Marshall’s books, you’ll find all sorts of Texas Easter eggs in the backgrounds, like the poster Baby Bear has taped to his wall in Goldilocks and the Three Bears:

There’s a wonderful 24-page interview with Marshall in Leonard Marcus’s book, Show Me A Story! Why Picture Books Matter. (The sketchbook images in this post were taken from the book.) He talks a lot about his upbringing and the art of making picture books, which he came to in his twenties after seeing Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, Domenico Gnoli’s The Art of Smiling, and Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad series (from Lobel he stole the idea for picture books made up of super-short stories). He also loved Tomi Ungerer, Edward Gorey, and old Japanese prints. He tells lots of funny stories, like the time he had a dream in which Martha demanded better storylines or she was going to Maurice Sendak’s house. “I woke up in a cold sweat!” he said. (Michael Jackson once said if he wasn’t around to receive ideas for songs, God would send them to Prince.)

Perhaps my favorite part of the Marcus book is the inclusion of Marshall’s sketchbooks, which are just wonderful.

I have always thought my best stuff was in my sketchbooks. I have hundreds and hundreds of sketchbooks. I like to work at night, I suppose because that’s when my defenses are sort of low. I have my most creative ideas at night. I’m less inhibited and I really let it rip.

One day I would love to go through his papers (which seem to be scattered at several universities?) — oh, to be able to flip through his sketchbooks! He said he had hundreds of unfinished stories, and often thought about doing a workbook where children could finish them. (I wonder if some of these ideas were used in the terrific animated series from HBO?)

Finally, here’s a 6-minute video of the man himself in his studio: