..You lucky readers.  This year, you’re definitely getting a  treat – from The Etherington Brothers!   Just click on the opening panel below  to see their special, spooky snippet… Happy Halloween!

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I recently purchased a Kindle.
For two main reasons: firstly, I was in danger of being marooned on my island of musty books as the digital tide swept past; secondly, a review on Amazon of one of my books knocked a star off for the shoddy conversion of the illustrations. Suitably miffed, I had to observe the damage for myself. It turned out it wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined. The book in question, Larklight by Philip Reeve, was illustrated in a style designed to evoke the etchings of Victorian periodicals, using very fine hatched lines. I’d used this technique before, and come unstuck occasionally when the illustrations were printed on lower quality paper. This made the images look as though they were whipped up using a decorator’s brush, not the many hours of painstaking dip-pen work (which is probably responsible for the current fragility of my eyesight). Consequently, I was expecting to see this kind of smudgy disaster emerge in digital form on the Kindle, but it was fine – the screen resolution ensured that the pictures were perfectly readable.
The problem arose when illustrations were taken out of context, enlarged or shrunk too much. The original book was designed so that the words and pictures interwove, wrapping round each other to produce an effect that only a traditional book could achieve. That has been lost in the conversion. I’m wondering, in the future will illustrated books be designed to sit more comfortably in these modern devices, but will it be too restrictive? Will we need to design specifically for the gadgets that deliver the content? Despite my reservations with the conversion of existing books, I think there are lots of exciting ways these gadgets can be exploited to tell stories in a new and fresh way.

And to get back to the ‘classics’ topic, you can access hundreds of free books at the touch of a button. Tonight I shall be enjoying The Castle of Otranto (and trying not to think of ways to illustrate it for a Kindle device).

David Wyatt has been an illustrator for a good while. Find out more at his ramshackle blog. 

I have never tried to rewrite or adapt a classic book, but characters from classic stories and nursery rhymes have certainly made many a guest appearance in my picture book work. Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Bears, the Big Bad Wolf, the Three Little Pigs and others, have all had walk-on parts. Their presence has leant these stories a certain familiarity and made it seem as if all these nursery characters, whether mine or somebody else’s creation, inhabit their own, real world where new stories may be happening all the time; much as the cartoon characters inhabit Toon Town, in the film Roger Rabbit. I find that idea quite reassuring. One only has to enter that world to discover a completely new adventure.

It sometimes takes a long time for a book to worm its way into my heart. I have to re-read it and flick through its pages again and again, savouring sentences and studying illustrations, seeing how the ink sits on the page. Then it becomes like an old and trusted friend.

One of my favourite classic books is Treasure Island, but I didn’t fully appreciate its brilliance until the right edition came along and everything clicked. I first became familiar with Treasure Island through the film starring Robert Newton who, with his greasy beard and rheumy eye, created the archetypal screen pirate. ‘Arrr, Jim lad!’

When I did eventually turn to the book, I was a bit disappointed. I have the same problem with music – it takes me years, sometimes, to appreciate what many people seem to get straight away! Anyway, the book didn’t quite work for me, until I found an edition that I fell in love with.

This was illustrated by one of my heroes, Mervyn Peake, where everything seemed to be right – the design and layout, the quality of the paper and, of course, Peake’s wonderful illustrations. Here was a pirate that enhanced the character on the page, and surpassed the screen version, which now began to look rather cartoony. Peake’s Long John Silver is so real you can almost smell the salt and sweat on his clothes. Read the rest of this entry »

A long time ago, I was flicking through the books on my parents’ shelves when I found a comic. This was a surprise, because my parents generally read Serious Grown-up Novels, and this comic didn’t seem very grown-up at all. It had magic and sword-fighting in it, not to mention some pretty graphic bloodshed. There was one image in particular which was so stomach-churning that I had to skip past it every time – although I would always take a moment to peer at it round the edge of the page, testing how much I could handle.

One of the less blood-spattered panels

I read the comic over and over. It was set in ancient Scotland, and told the story of a general who received a prophecy from three witches that he would one day rule the kingdom. Consumed with ambition, he killed the king and took his place, going on to kill (there was a lot of killing) anyone he thought might suspect the truth. In the end he was killed by the rightful heir to the throne, and the very last picture showed the three witches dancing around his gravestone.

As you might have guessed, the comic was called Macbeth, and according to the spine it had been written by someone called William Shakespeare. Read the rest of this entry »

Daunt Books packed a hoard of DFC Library supporters into their lovely Holland Park book shop last night – we were all there to celebrate The Etherington Bros’ brilliant new story, Baggage! You can sneak a look at the book here…  Party photos are courtesy of the ever-snappy Sarah McIntyre:

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I love story retellings because they’re a great excuse to play fan girl AND make a comic! When I was a teenager, I had a terrible crush on Cyrano de Bergerac, the French film version played by Gerard Depardieu, and also related to him entirely, having no success in my own little love life. I saw the film three times in the cinema and I still often play the soundtrack when I’m making books in my studio (in fact, I’m listening to it right now!)

So when I got back into making comics, it was not much of a leap of the imagination to write myself into the story. I play Sister Marthe, the little nun near the end who tries to feed the wounded and exhausted Cyrano some soup. It was a comic I wrote and drew in a couple hours, then posted on my blog. I had no idea where it would go when I started, but making it was so incredibly entertaining.

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A long, long time ago…(well, 1998) and in a very different Economic Landscape, a Story Finder called David decided that it would be a good idea if children everywhere could read and enjoy the old stories: the fairy tales and folk legends  that we all love. He asked some storytellers of his acquaintance to retell these and I was one of the chosen ones. I wrote The Six Swan Brothers and it was beautifully illustrated by Ian Beck.

That’s only one example of my retelling history. I’ve retold a great many things: ballet stories, opera stories, other fairy tales and every time I’ve done it,  I’ve loved the experience and I’ve been lucky enough to have marvellous illustrators to bring my efforts to life: Emma Chichester Clark, Christian Birmingham,  Louise Brierley, Jane Ray, and many others.

Now, gather round while I tell you my secret. I like retelling stories because in one significant way, it’s very much easier than writing a book or a story from scratch. Is this a shameful admission? I don’t think so. It’s no more guilt-inducing than saying you like making cakes.

A short digression by way of illustration.  I’m hooked at the moment on the television series called THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE-OFF in which contestants are making cakes, biscuits, pastries, pies, puddings etc. every Tuesday evening.  Each time, one of them gets eliminated and the last woman standing (the men have all  gone already) is the WINNER!  Every week, you see different examples of, let’s say (because it was the hardest task the bakers have been given) a chocolate roulade. There is great variation in what the bakers end up with from a mixture that is, at heart, just flour, fat and eggs. Their skills turn these raw materials into things of unimaginable temptation and deliciousness or complete flops but the flour, eggs, butter DO NOT HAVE TO BE REINVENTED  each time they bake a cake.

So: retelling a story is baking from known and familiar ingredients. Read the rest of this entry »

I could not possibly disagree with either Linda or Melanie.

Well, yes I could. On one little little point. Linda’s title for her post “Thieving Magpies” was no doubt intended to be provocative. I am duly provoked :)

‘Theft’ implies property. The thing that is stolen belongs to someone else. But to whom does a work like Jane Eyre belong? Or The Turn of the Screw or The Silver Chair? Of course the law may allow heirs and corporations to own rights over past works. But that seems a bit like allowing the descendant of some Victorian collector to own treasures that his ancestor looted from the tombs of the Pharoahs.

The big, old, much-loved stories belong to everyone. They get retold and retold, in many forms. Not a year goes by without another Jane Austen TV serialisation or film re-make. Now, it would be a brave writer who actually tried to re-write Pride and Predjudice, but shift it to another century, put it in different clothes, call it Bridget Jones’ Diary and it works. Who’s the poorer? Read the rest of this entry »

Because of the subject of the last round of blogs (an Archie moment), I ended up producing a comic strip about Inspector Clouseau. It was fun, but not the way I generally work, so for the next set of blogs I said to myself that i’d try and do an illustration closer to the way I usually work.

The subject for this set of blogs was to discuss literary classics.

As chance would have it I had already started something along these lines…  A couple of years ago I spoke to someone who suggsted that I try some illustrations for a classic book because it suited my quite (at the time) traditional way of working.The three books that came to mind were Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels and Treasure Island.  I decided to go with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

My first idea was to try and illustrate it in a Darwin-esque way, drawing different tools, flowers, objects and places that Robinson found on his journey. But I wanted to see what Robinson looked like so I did some concepts of him as well as a narrative image of a raft in a rough sea. In the end I wasn’t really sure whether to to illustrate it in a more narrative way or a more scientific way. I think my preference would have been narrative, but the trouble with that is that it had already been done and done very well in that style by N.C Wyeth.

I had other ideas i was working on at the time, so in the end decided to shelve it until I become more established, maybe then I’ll be able to take on a literary classic…

Some of the concepts I did for it are below.

Richard Collingridge is an illustrator and concept artist. He has previously worked on the covers for Trash by Andy Mulligan, The Deserter by Peadar O’ Guilin, and WE by John Dickinson. Richard’s first picture book, When It Snows, is currently in production. You can find out more about Richard on his webpage.

Like most authors I read every book I could get my hands on as a child although, because money was tight, I only owned a tiny percentage of what I must have got through over the years. Mostly I borrowed titles from libraries. But anything I particularly loved I managed to get hold of in paperback and these I trawled through over and over again.

Now this is probably going to sound quite odd for a children’s writer but, until this summer, I hadn’t actually seen any of my precious childhood paperbacks since I was about eighteen. So I knew I’d read them, but I didn’t have them in my home any more. And I think part of me probably liked this because it meant they were all stuck in my subconscious somewhere (along with the television test card and my instinctive aversion to butterscotch Angel Delight).

Anyway, this summer my mum finally made a trip to her old attic, found as many of my books as she could and brought them up to Suffolk. Looking through them has been a strange experience – but also a brilliant one for this blog topic.

I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone who’s read either of my first two books that they’re influenced by a love of classic children’s tales: the kind you read on a cold winter’s day (ideally with a bag of sweets and a mug of cocoa). I’ve always remembered clearly that I read and re-read a lot of strange second-hand books like the Abbey Girls series and these ones here:

Don't ask me what Susan rushed into, I've got no idea.

But it was lovely discovering the books I thought I’d forgotten about.  Read the rest of this entry »