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I invited Lisa onto Miss Marple’s Musings because I fell in love with her art for her latest collaboration—MUMMY CAT, written by Marcus Ewert! As a feline-fanatic, I this memorable story within a story set in Ancient Egypt is one … Continue reading →

The Drawing Center is hosting the “Tomi Ungerer: All in One” exhibit. As a children’s books creator, Tomi Ungerer (pictured, via) has become well-known for the picture books The Three Robbers and Moon Man.

According to the press release, Claire Gilman served as the curator for this art show. It will run from January 16th to March 22nd.

This retrospective features Ungerer’s “childhood drawings depicting the Nazi invasion of Strasbourg, through his work in New York and Canada, and concluding with the artist’s most recent political and satirical campaigns, as well as his illustrations for the 2013 children’s book Fog Island, ‘Tomi Ungerer: All in One’ re-introduces this wildly creative individual to New York City and the world.” Visitors will also see Ungerer’s erotic artwork and animation pieces.

Here are some literary events to pencil in your calendar this week.

To get your event posted on our calendar, visit our Facebook Your Literary Event page. Please post your event at least one week prior to its date.

The organizers behind Pen Parentis will be hosting a Winter Poetry Night. Join in on Tuesday, January 13th at Hotel Andaz starting 7 p.m. (New York, NY)

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Here are some literary events to pencil in your calendar this week.

To get your event posted on our calendar, visit our Facebook Your Literary Event page. Please post your event at least one week prior to its date.

The organizers behind Pen Parentis will be hosting a Winter Poetry Night. Join in on Tuesday, January 13th at Hotel Andaz starting 7 p.m. (New York, NY)

Horror writer Devan Sagliani will appear for a signing session. See him on Saturday, January 17th at Barnes & Noble (Santa Monica branch) from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Santa Monica, CA)

Children’s books creator Tomi Ungerer will headline an author event to talk about his artistic process. Meet him on Sunday, January 18th from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. (New York, NY)

These cartoonists stood up against intimidation and fought for their right to freedom of expression. Let us celebrate their victories.

Hervé Tullet is known for his prodigious versatility, from directing ad campaigns to designing fabric for Hermès. But his real love is working with children, for whom he has published dozens of books, including Press Here.

Christopher Weyant’s work has been published worldwide in books, newspapers, magazines, and online. His cartoons are in permanent collection at The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. YOU ARE (NOT) SMALL is his first children’s book.

Carson Ellis is an award-winning illustrator who has provided art for bestsellers such as "The Mysterious Benedict Society" by Trenton Lee Stewart, The Composer Is Dead by Lemony Snicket, and the "Wildwood Chronicles" by her husband, Colin Meloy.

In the 1950s, when the pages of the Saturday Evening Post and McCall’s were dominated with the realist paintings of Norman Rockwell and Bernie Fuchs, French-born illustrator Tomi Ungerer brought in his loose, graphic drawing style and absurdist sensibilities and changed the direction of American illustration. In the new documentary film Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story, we learn about Ungerer’s early life in Alsace, France as a young artist encouraged by the Nazi party during their French occupation, to his journey to America in search of new opportunities, and his subsequent blacklisting from the children’s book industry.

Featuring interviews with Steven Heller, Jules Feiffer and the late Maurice Sendak, Far Out Isn’t Far Enough is a buoyant and vivid documentary film, painting an inspiring picture of an award-winning illustrator, trilingual author, brilliant satirist, and dedicated humanitarian advocate. Ungerer upended social and professional morays in the pre-pre-Internet era, delighting (and offending) editors, critics and readers by breaking taboos, back when there was still a better assortment of taboos waiting to be broken.

Ungerer’s portrayal is both of an unstable-but-good spirited neighborhood kook and avuncular storyteller, grinning from behind a freshly lit joint and admiring a recently found dismembered baby doll appendage. “Children should be traumatized,” he grins. “If you want to give them an identity, children should be traumatized.” And he speaks from personal experience; socially paranoid, emotionally erratic and “oblivious,” as recounted by Sendak, he represents that classic tortured artist, except that instead of wringing his hands over how best to suffer for his creations, he suffered, survived and then created.

“When I draw it’s a real need,” says Ungerer. “It’s the kind of need like, if you’re hungry, you have to eat, or you have to go to the toilet—it’s got to go out.” His early children’s books, The Mellops Go Flying and Crictor, about pigs and a boa constrictor, respectively, set the tone for the work that would follow: “detestable” creatures (a vulture, a bat, an ogre) cleverly depicted as unlikely heroes, providing children with much needed provocative subject matter.

His political posters were motivated by his fascination with the American civil rights movement and the global conflicts of the 1960s: Uncle Sam shoving Lady Liberty down the throat of a Vietnamese man, a black figure and a white figure devouring each other from opposite ends, a military plane dropping silhouetted bombs under a curtain of pink ribbon presents with the label “Give,” all of which retain their graphic resonance to this day.

And his erotic works, which served as a personal rebellion against his puritanical upbringing, began with a personal relationship that involved “a bit of bondage,” and evolved into titles like Fornicon, a collection of erotica and “mechanical sex recipes.”

While the diversity of his work is one of the most unique aspects of his career, it was this sort of simultaneous co-habitation of creative worlds that eventually worked against him, getting his children’s books (unofficially) banned from libraries for over twenty-five years. His detractors have finally come around and he has received recognition for his body of work as a children’s book author and illustrator. In 1998, Ungerer was presented the Hans Christian Anderson award for his “lasting contribution to children’s literature” and named Ambassador for Childhood and Education by the 47-nation Council of Europe.

If anything, the film may leave you longing for the Golden Age of Publishing in the 1950s and ’60s, where any talented newcomer with the right portfolio—or in Ungerer’s case, a Trojan condom box—could go from door to door peddling their illustrations, and become an industry darling.

Far Out Isn’t Far Enough is directed by Brad Bernstein, and features motion graphics supervised by Brandon Dumlao. The film is distributed by First Run Features and is continuing to open in theaters across the country.

Here’s one documentary I look forward to seeing: Rick Cikowski and Brad Bernstein’s Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story. Illustrator Ungerer (The Three Robbers) is the famed children’s book author/artist and occasional pornographer, revered by Maurice Sendak, Jules Feiffer (both of whom appear in the doc) and Gene Deitch (who has adapted several of Ungerer’s books to animation). Filmmakers Cikowski and Bernstein funded the production last year through Kickstarter. It will premiere next month at the Toronto Inernational Film Festival. It looks good:

(Thanks, Martin Quaden)

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I apologize for the recent radio silence, folks.  There’s something goofy in the state of Fuse 8.  For one thing, I can’t seem to comment on my own posts.  Most peculiar.  I will assume that this is just a passing fancy of the blog and that all will be well and good from this day forward.  Onward then!

This year, as some of you may know, I eschewed plastering myself with fake tattoos in favor of instead impaling myself with Shrinky Dinks at the Newbery/Caldecott Banquet.  Shrinky Dinks: The classy choice.  I did this because I was tired of picking clumps of multicolored skin off of my arms in airports, but if we want to get to the real reason behind the reason I can sum it up in three words: Becky Quiroga Curtis.  More specifically, Becky Quiroga Curtis, the Children’s Book Buyer and Event Coordinator of Books & Books (also known as one of the only reasons to visit Miami).  This is a woman who takes her love of children’s books and turns it hardcore.  Oh, you think you love picture books?  Really?  Enough to have them tattooed onto your arm?!?!  Just one arm, mind you.  In any case, you can see how she convinces artists to draw on her arm here and you can see a feature on her at the Scholastic blog On Our Minds here and an older PW article on her here.  You can also enjoy a slew of posts showing the tattoos if you follow the Becky’s Arm tag.  Hard.  Core.

• By the way, folk.  A bunch of you signed up to get cool PDFs of my Top 100 polls, yes?  You may be wondering where the heck those PDFs are, yes?  Well fear not.  I have it from on high that they are almost done, looking good, and you should see them within the next week or so.  Stay tuned, faithful readers!

• On the One Hand: The recent news that Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan is being turned into a film is fantastic and I am very excited indeed.

• On the Other Hand: The book is being turned into a screenplay by . . . . Stephenie Meyer.  Hubba wha?

• So I was looking at the very cool Spring 2013 Sneak Preview provided by PW, which offers a glimpse of some of the upcoming books next year.  Fun stuff.  And as I look I note several things of interest.  The most notable is by far the fact that Yuyi Morales has a book coming out called Niño Wrestles the World that features a kid dressed as a Mexican wrestler . . . I’m beyond thrilled.  Oh, and then there’s this little picture book coming out with Greenwillow called, um, Giant Dance Party.  And who is it by?  Well let’s see here. . .  could it be by me?  I do believe it could be.  *smile*

• 0 Comments on Fusenews: Look for the Girl with the Caterpillar Tattoo and She’s Gone as of 8/9/2012 11:16:00 PM