I was living in New York and I realized that I had to figure out some way to make money. I think I came to New York with about $500. I was painting a lot, but I was down to the wire. My friend Jeffrey Jones asked or said that he could introduce me to a friend of his who maybe I could get a cover, doing a cover for a magazine.
It was for a comic magazine called Epic Illustrated. At the time this was when Marvel Comics had started doing, creator-owned comics. I said, “Well, you know. I’ll just do a couple of images,” and I did the few images and it became a story. I did a three-page comic book story. I did the word balloons and everything, but I thought I’d show this to the editor and maybe he would find a way for me to do book covers from seeing what kind of work I could do.
And he bought it. He bought the story! This really surprised me. Through that I got into comics and started doing more comics and became very, very interested in the relationship of words to pictures and our perception in relationship to both of those — the triangulation between the reader and the words and the pictures and how that works.
That informed my work in children’s books a lot afterwards. I worked in comics for about 20 years, I think. Towards the end of the time that I was working in comics, my first son was born. I wanted to talk about different things. It was really important to somehow address different aspects than I had previously been addressing in my work and comics — different aspects of life.
I just wanted to explore this relationship with this new little being. I was fortunate enough to be invited by Kodansha, a Japanese publisher, to do an eight-page a month series in one of their Manga magazines, but it ran for three years. They said pretty much just do whatever you like. I painted a story that worked the way a comic book works, panel by panel. It ran, it was a serial story of a father and son, so I was able to go through work, through the feelings I was having as a new dad. It ran for three years in Japan.
They collected the first year and I thought it would be nice to find an English language publisher. I brought it back and all the comic book companies were saying, “This is really great, except it’s really a children’s book,” and I said, “Okay,” so I took it to Scholastic. At the time they were not doing any kind of graphic novels.
They said, “Well, this is great, but we’re not doing graphic novels.” And I said, “Oh, okay.” I went home to try to think of what else I might do. I got a call then from David Sailer at Scholastic asking if, he said, “I know you weren’t looking to do children’s books, but there’s this text that came in and would you mind just taking a look at it and see what you think.” He sent me, Come On, Rain!, which became my first children’s book.
As soon as I read this wonderful story by Karen Hess, it just fully bloomed in my mind. I knew exactly what the little girl looked like. I knew exactly where she lived. I knew everything because her writing is so magnificent. The timing was perfect. That’s how it started.