So Chloe and the Lion is a book that starts off as a kind of traditional story about a girl getting lost in the woods, but then devolves into an argument over who’s more important in a picture book, the author or the illustrator. And the answer, of course, is the author. But that’s not really what the book’s about. That’s just a fact.
It’s a book that goes crazy. In the middle of the it, the illustrator – well, I make a lion eat Adam Rex, the illustrator, hire a new illustrator, fire that guy – so I end up having to illustrate part of the book myself. That’s my illustration debut and finale, I have a feeling, as well. And that book actually has illustrations by me. All the terrible artwork at that point was drawn by me.
That one, I think, is an important book, if you’re reading out loud, to use good voices. When you’re reading as the Mac Barnett character, something sonorous, a lot of dignity. I don’t know what a genius voice is, but that’s the one that I would use, and then for Adam, something kind of annoying, cloying, irrelevant. I don’t know how – I don’t know how you make an irrelevant voice, but that’s the one I would use for Adam.
But really, for that book – that book is about the thing that’s most fascinating to me about picture books, which is that relationship between text and image. And I think that picture books work best not necessarily when text and image are hand in hand, but when there’s an interesting relationship between them, a tension, almost, that image is amplifying text or complicating text or even contradicting text.
So that’s sort of taking image and text contradicting each other to its greatest extreme, where the words and the pictures end up in an argument with each other. Adam and I have actually really never fought about anything making a book. The collaboration’s good. Editors and I have fought, but not Adam and I, so that bit is a fiction.
