Wow! City! Isabelle wrote also. When she was 18 months old she, had three words — wow, hi, and mom. And I took her to New York, which I had lived in New York for 22 years before I moved out to Utah, and being new parents, my wife and I wouldn’t put her in taxi cause there are no car seats in taxis. It’s dangerous, okay, so I put her in a backpack — a kid-carrying backpack.
We hiked our kids all over the place in the mountains. I put her in the backpack and I took her on the subway and she’d go on the subway and she’d say, “Wow!” And she saw the airplane when we were leaving to go to New York City. She said, “Wow!” And basically, so she wrote the book. And what I did was I took all of my favorite experiences in New York
There’s a fire station on 18th Street, Engine Company 12 I believe. I lived next door to it when I was in art school and every few hours you would hear all this noise. You know, “Wonk, wonk, wonk,” and a fire — and a fireman would run out in the middle of the street and he would stop traffic. The fire engine would come out with the sirens blaring and this little red light would be turning around on the side of the firehouse and there would be all this noise and confusion.
And these guys would go roaring down the street and they would either come back four hours later smelling of smoke or they’d come back 15 minutes later all kind of disappointed, you know. And so that became the keystone spread of Wow! City! and it was basically my own experience. And I did a drawing of that and I showed it to the people at Hyperion and they bought the book on the spot.
I also put in the Chinese New Year’s Parade which, when I was an art student, was a must do cause it was free entertainment, you know, and the kids would take these entire blocks of 1,000 firecrackers and light the whole thing and throw it in the street. So much of the technique in Wow! City! is to try to capture the kinetic energy in the noise.
You know, like “Wow! Subway!” Fourteenth Street was my station and the trains would come around that curve on 14th street and they’d screech, you know. And so, anyway, so I tried to catch the noise and the excitement of the city. We ended up not calling it “Wow! New York!” so the kids in San Francisco or Chicago or any big city could enjoy it as well.
And that was my first book and that’s how I got into it. And then once I got into it, I got hooked on it and every book that’s come from them has been an exciting experience all its own.
