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“In 1986, two artists – one Russian, one American – joined forces, against the odds, to tell a brand-new kind of picture story.”

Back in February it was in all the news.  Publishers Weekly proclaimed loud and long, Children’s Imprint from McSweeney’s to Launch in May.  For some this didn’t seem a huge surprise.  McSweeney’s had unofficially been publishing books like The Clock Without a Face, The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming, and Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things for years.  They’d just never gone so far as to make an imprint out of it all.  Add on their commitment to 826 National and their decision feels like a foregone conclusion more than anything else.  The result: McMullens.

For the initial release McMullens is putting out three new picture books and one reprint.  And for me, it’s the reprint I find the most interesting.  Here Comes the Cat was published by Scholastic in 1989. Read the publication page and you’ll see that it calls itself ‘the first-ever Soviet/American picture-book collaboration”.  Oh so?  A quickie search on Worldcat and I see that at least 902 libraries have that old edition, so this may not be an obscure reprinting.

In this book the words are printed both in English and in Russian.  A single mouse travels through the countryside with a message: “Here comes the cat!”  He moves along by balloon, by foot, and even by fish.  When he reaches a city the mouse residents pick up the cry and start repeating it on their own.  When at last the shadow of the cat falls upon them, however, they see that rather than bring death and destruction he is instead towing a great wheel of cheese.  Our parting shot is of the mouse that spread the news, traveling away on the back of the cat he preceded.

In the back of the book both Vladimir Vagin and Frank Asch offer comments on the book, and McMullens has cleverly included their comments from both 1989 and 2011.  In the 1989 section Asch explains how they met at a Soviet/American children’s book symposium in 1986.  Vagin then mentions how this collaboration “is the first book in the world designed by an American and painted by a Russian.”  I wonder at that, and must assume that he means a Russian who was living in Russia at the time.  Of course since the publication of this book Vagin moved to America and ended up illustrating

In the great glass half-empty or half-full debate, I am a hardcore half-emptier. I don’t understand pretending things are rosier than real life. And I really don’t see how my attitude toward the contents of any metaphorical glass are going to influence the sum total of those contents. The ones who call themselves optimists have a name for people like me: pessimist. But people on my side of the glass conundrum have a name for ourselves: realists. Because the real truth is that if half of what you had is gone, feeling good about what you have left, while pleasant, doesn’t bring it back. Having said all that, though, I do feel excited about reaching the halfway point in our book blogging year today. We made it! We’re finally here. We stuck to it, even on challenging days, and now half the year is behind us. But, and here’s where the existential angst comes into play, it’s also with great anticipation that I look forward to the reading moments ahead. I love that everyone in the house is on high-alert for reading every day. I like that the children’s librarian knows Scarlett’s name and Scarlett can recognize the “liberry” when we get close on our bikes. So, what book got the coveted halfway spot? Daddy and Scarlett picked Frank Asch’s Ziggy Piggy And The Three Little Pigs to find out how a new addition to the old fairy tale mixes things up. It’s been half a year and all’s well.


http://www.amazon.com/Ziggy-Piggy-Three-Little-Pigs/dp/1550745158

http://www.frankasch.com/splash.html