Children's Bookshelf Talks with Jon J Muth

By Tonia Saxon, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 1/31/2008

Before he began writing and illustrating picture books, Caldecott Honor artist Jon J Muth had a successful career as a graphic novelist. Zen Ties, a sequel to Muth’s Caldecott Honor-winning Zen Shorts, has just been released from Scholastic Press. Bookshelf spoke with him last week by phone.

How did you make the switch from comics to picture books?

I was doing eight pages a month for Kodansha in Japan, for Afternoon, one of those comics that are as fat as telephone books. I took my stuff to David Saylor at Scholastic, and he said, “I really like these, but we’re not doing any graphic novels.” But then about a week later he got hold of me and said, “Would you consider doing a picture book? We’ve just gotten this book called Come On, Rain!” And they really got behind that first endeavor—they had the right spirit.

What was working with them like?

Well, I think it requires a lot of trust, to work with me. I don’t sketch very much ahead of time. It can be very difficult for editors, I think. I tend to do a very rough—very, very rough—gestural thing to get a sense of the pacing. Then I’ll try to refine it a little bit and I’ll give that to them. I’ll show them a drawing and I’ll say, “In four or five pages, this is going to happen. But I don’t really know how I’m going to get there yet.”

Who are you working with?

Dianne Hess and David Saylor. I’m so indebted to both of them. They have trust, but they also have the ability to ask really hard questions. The concepts in my books are sometimes... unusual. Well,people say they’re unusual, they don’t seem unusual to me. And they’re my first readers. Dianne goes over every syllable; she’s extraordinarily thorough, she makes you justify everything. She needs to understand exactly why X is doing this. Then I have to say, “But that’s what he would do.” And David took what I gave him and designed—well, he made the book you have before you.

I wondered about the difference between picture books and comic books—do they ask different things of you?

Oh, I was just thinking about this for an afterword I wrote. I think of comic books and graphic novels as a kind of natural forum for exploring the concerns of young people. It’s a place to look at angst and the absurdity of the reality young people find themselves in; it’s a place where an outsider can express himself. But when I had children I suddenly felt—there wasn’t any outsider anymore.

Yes, I felt that, too! But you don’t construct the stories any differently, or do the art any differently?

I don’t think I consciously do anything differently. Writing books is a kind of natural process. You put an idea in motion, or a group of characters into a situation, and the relationship between them kind of unfolds. I never sit down and think about what the end of the book’s going to be. And the visual qualities—it’s really just a matter of what medium can most readily carry the intention of the story. Watercolor has a kind of evanescence; it’s so evocative. It really seems to reflect the life of a child.

And Zen Shorts just kind of unfolded that way?

Zen Shorts started with two things. The first thing was a drawing I did... of a panda... wearing a very large pair of shorts. [Interviewer laughs.] And I laughed, just like that. And I put it away in a drawer and didn’t do anything with it. A while after that, I wondered what it would be like to be a child like the child I was when I was growing up, living in a neighborhood like the neighborhood I lived in, but living down the street from a spiritual master. And I remembered the panda, and I realized—that’s the guy! He’s the spiritual master down the street!

Then, after I had this idea for Zen Shorts, I did a painting of a little boy looking out the window, and I didn’t know who he was looking at. Then I realized—that’s who he’s looking at.

Are they your children, the children in the book?

Well, they are in essence. I do tend to use the inspiration of being around those kids and their responses and their enthusiasms for things. I’ve had to slow down their aging, though. My son’s going to be driving in a couple of months.... 

And Miss Whitaker [the elderly neighbor in Zen Ties]?

I took my children to see my grandmother in Ohio a couple of years ago; she was 94 then, but she was completely present. And I felt kind of bittersweet about it. I thought, if these people were not related, they wouldn’t have any experience of each other. It would be the kid knocking the ball into the yard and the old lady yelling.

That was the kernel. I know the story’s about a panda who talks, but it’s all very grounded in reality. I wouldn’t know how to write fantasy stories.

I love the Zen stories in Zen Shorts—there are so many great ones, you could just have gone on telling dozens of them. 

Yes, but I didn’t want to do that; it would have been more like a parlor trick. I just wanted to kind of point to them, to kind of say, ‘Go, go find the source!’

In Zen Shorts, Stillwater told the children the wonderful tales, but there weren’t any other people around. It was just the children and Stillwater, and it felt sort of... 

Lonely?

Yes! But in Zen Ties the children get to go out into the world and see what it’s like to live the way the stories seem to suggest you can, to behave toward Miss Whitaker the way Stillwater does. He sees right through to the heart of her, to the very best person she is. 

I think that’s what the best teachers do—they see to the heart of who you really are. And that way of life is possible for anybody, anywhere in the world. You just are that way because it’s the best way to be. It doesn’t have a particular set of clothes that it wears. It shouldn’t be something that’s foreign to us. And the best art facilitates that.

Will there be more Stillwater?

I didn’t expect there would be, but I think there are going to be four. I’ve got the third one worked out in my head already; that one came really fast. You know how in haiku poetry the seasons are important—each of the books will be one season. Zen Shorts has cherry blossoms on the cover, and Zen Ties is summer....

And do you think you might turn to graphic novels again sometime, now that your kids are growing up?

I’m working on one now. It’s a book I’ve been wanting to do for about 10 years, an adaptation of a Stanislaw Lem story. I wrote to him to ask for the rights to the story and I didn’t think I’d get any sort of response—he sounded as if he might be a pretty prickly guy. But I sent him a package of drawings and said I was interested in the story, and he wrote back and said yes. He was very nice. I hadn’t been able to find a publisher before, but Scholastic has a graphic novel imprint, and I’m going to do it for them.