Colour Story
Article by Tohby Riddle
[First published in The Age, 1998]

AMERICAN SATIRIST Art Buchwald once dared the great picture book creator Dr Seuss to write a political book. Seuss's response was to send him a copy of his recent release, Marvin K Mooney Will You Please Go Now! with each mention of Mooney's name deleted, and replaced with the name "Richard M. Nixon" – who was then United States President. Buchwald ran this version in his syndicated column and nine days later, Nixon resigned. On a visit to Sydney soon afterwards, Dr Seuss claimed he was greeted as "the man who got rid of Nixon".

So who says picture books are just for children? If Dr Seuss still doubted that his work was reaching a wider audience, the proof came when his final book, Oh the Places You Will Go was published, in 1990. It shot straight to the top of the adult bestseller lists, where it stayed for years. "That proves it!" he responded. "I no longer write for children. I write for people."

The commodification of art can lead to rigid classification. This is remarkably prevalent in what is termed "children's literature". For commercial convenience, this literature is neatly classified into a flummoxing number of categories and genres. However, some works defy classification. Usually, the good ones. How would one truly classify The Little Prince or Gulliver's Travels, for example?

Yet budding authors challenge these classifications at their peril. This year, my latest picture book, The Great Escape from City Zoo, was shortlisted for the Children's Book Council Picture Book of the Year. It has also been enthusiastically bid for by a prestigious United States publisher – a fortuitous outcome for a book that almost didn't happen. The reason? I chose to illustrate it in black and white. The more I explored the idea of The Great Escape from City-Zoo – with its Depression era, Saturday-matinee movie quality – I felt I had no choice. In fact, I was excited by the idea.

This decision immediately jeopardised an otherwise perfectly publishable proposal. It defied the usual criteria for classification in children's publishing with regard to picture books. "Kids like bright colors," was the standard feedback.

But equally apparent was the sense that the black-and-white medium was intrinsically less appealing than color. That one only used black-and-white if one couldn't afford color.

It seems that since we can print in color, we do. One needs to look no further than newspapers to notice that black-and white photography, illustrations and cartoons are disappearing because of increased color printing.

Harold Ross, the maverick founding editor of The New Yorker, was once asked why he didn't print the cartoons in color. "What's so funny about red?" he replied.

He chose not to. Just as some film makers still choose to shoot their films in black and white – Woody Allen's Manhattan is a beautiful example.

I liked the idea that there was a choice. A choice, of course, informed by the nature of the story – not available technology, budgets, or perceived market demands: the dog would wag the tail.

None the less, defying conventional wisdom about picture books made me a little nervous as I undertook the project – not to mention my editor, who had convinced her publishing house, HarperCollins to take the risk. It is not always smooth sailing in the rapids where art meets commerce. What consoled me, and kept my paint brush steady, was the idea that if the project was going to fail commercially, it may as well be a bold, ambitious failure rather than a compromised, "market-research" failure.

Anything can happen in a picture book. So long as we let it. No two need necessarily be alike. That is the beauty of the medium. As a vehicle for writers, illustrators, designers and editors, it offers seemingly limitless possibility. I always try to remind myself of this.

Picture books are also extremely hard to do. I don't need to remind myself of this. If it is to have words, the words are just the beginning. How and where should it then be illustrated? How should it be designed?

And, because it's a picture book, other considerations inevitably haunt the process: will children like it? Is it suitable for children?

C. S. Lewis once wrote, maybe rather harshly, that "a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story". It follows that a book aimed only at children risks the same categorisation. It should appeal to any age, not just because adults usually buy the book or because they will probably have to read the story to the child, but because, if the book appeals to adults, too, it is likely to have depth and levels of meaning. It is likely to be a better book.

Perhaps we also need to ask, will adults like it? It thrills me to hear that people are buying The Great Escape from City Zoo, not just for their children but for their partners and friends. I like to see adults able to delight in picture books as much as children.

As for a work being suitable for children, the arguments that surround this notion of suitability are invariably laden with enough assumptions and prejudices to debilitate any creative process.

One of the greatest picture books of all, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, troubled many parents and librarians when it was published in 1963. They felt it was too scary for children – possibly even harmful to them. But children drew strength from it. And grew up with it. To this day, it never fails to inspire a childlike wonder in me – the same feeling I had as a child gazing upon its pages for the first time.

Again, I defer to Lewis: "Anyone who can write a children's story without a moral had better do so."

For me, a work need only be beautiful, magical and humorous – beautiful as in well composed; magical as in enchanting – and humorous as in the opposite of humorless.

Most of all, this medium has too much potential and too rich a history to remain one of children's publishing's best-kept secrets. In the mischievous, subversive tradition of Dr Seuss, it's high time a picture book toppled another government!