Whenever someone becomes a parent, it’s a big deal. I just was poorly prepared. I was overwhelmed, it was a kind of, for me, very personal spiritual experience, that’s the only way to describe it. It just changed everything in the sense that I felt completely responsible for this little being and as his custodian, I wanted to make the world a better place.
I don’t think that’s a particularly unique feeling, but I do think that my way of handling it wasn’t the best and it ended up, I mean, it’s eventually kind of rippled out into the work that I’m doing now, so I’m very happy about that, but it was a very difficult time. Growing up as an artist, it’s a very selfish profession. The job description is that it’s about you, you, you — your sense of how the world works and so on.
Suddenly here, and it’s not about me; it’s about someone else and by extension it’s about everyone else. That was my experience of it. The kind of work that I could do in comic books at the time was not a place
comic books just wasn’t a place that was going to have room to explore the kind of thing that was becoming important to me.
I’m thankful now though the industry has changed and certainly with book publishers putting out comic books there’s a lot more themes that are being explored. That’s really marvelous. But the things that I was doing in comics was more adult-oriented, more young man-oriented. Things that you know where you’re considering your spot in the universe and the angst you feel about the absurdity of life and so on.
But it’s not taking any responsibility for any of that. I felt like I needed to kind of work my way around to understanding what this meant. That just sort of naturally came out in children’s book. The first one that I wrote and illustrated which was The Three Questions. I had heard this story a long time ago. I had read the story and then I was reading a book by Thich Nhat Hanh who was a Vietnamese monk and very well known and wonderful author, and he retold the story in one of his books — the story by Leo Tolstoy.
When I read it in his book it just was like this little deep laid dynamite charge going off and I thought, I want to give this to my son. I want to give this to children. But they can’t have to wait until they understand Czarist Russia to be able to work with it. That’s how that story started for me.
That was a kind of major turning point where I thought I’m able to explore the things that are really important to me right now in this medium and I’m really amazed and happy that the children’s book world has had room for me.