I’d been doing television for a while, and I wanted a new challenge. I love the physicality of books. I love the fact that you can change the aspect ratio. You can make a book square. You can make it very rectangular. You can make it very tall. You have things like the page turn that really affects the timing of these books. But at the same time, you don’t have the control that you do, which I like. I like the idea that each book can be read differently and have a different meaning, and it’s much more of an open thing.
So, I was determined to do books, and I took some time off. I moved to Oxford for about a month, on the assumption that if I was in Oxford, I’d somehow be smarter. I worked on what I thought were the great American children’s books, and they stank. They were just terrible. But as I was doing that, I was making these little doodles, and this character started bugging me — the pigeon, it turned out to be. He demanded more and more of my day. After I worked and tried to do something good, I’d just spend the day doodling this pigeon. Finally, I put him in a sketchbook. Every year I’d put out a very small sketchbook that I would send to family, friends, and clients. That was pretty much it.
I thought that it was over, and I got an agent maybe three or four years later. She said, “Yeah, you know, you’re right. Your books do stink.” Then I gave her, just sort of as a giveaway, the pigeon sketchbook. And she said, “But I think there’s a book in that. I think that that’s a book.”
So, I was very lucky. I didn’t see it, necessarily, as a children’s book. I just saw it as a funny pigeon.
