a giant disguise

firecrackers

louis, don't!

Here are some character sketches (a rocket is a character, right?) from a book I'm making, called Louis, Don't! It stars my son, Louis, in the lead role, and myself, not pictured, in a supporting turn. And an alien. And space fruit. Don't worry, it'll all make sense.

frog

baby walks trailer

In today's episode of Putting the Cart Before the Horse, watch a work-in-progress trailer for a book that has yet to be sold, Baby Walks, written by Dan Richards, and illustrated by me. Idle hands and all that.

louie and daddy

robot and robette

the greedy worm

It's semi-official! Assuming my contract doesn't explode in the mail, my next book as an author/illustrator (and my third with the incomparable Justin Chanda at Simon & Schuster) is The Greedy Worm. It's about a greedy worm. There, now you don't have to read the book. But please do. I shouldn't have said that.

hippopotamus

the incredible disappearing website

For some reason, my website no longer exists. I don't recall getting any correspondence from my hosting company regarding this matter, but then again, I don't recall much ever since the "accident". The upshot to this is that it's the final push I need to completely overhaul http://www.newmanpictures.com/, which has been severely played out for a good half-decade.

Until that happens, please contact me at newmanpictures@hotmail.com. Thank you, Hotmail. And thank you, reader.

phoebe & digger

Tricia Springstubb's Phoebe & Digger, which I had the great pleasure of illustrating, is also complete! It'll be published by Candlewick Press a few months after Rabbit's Snow Dance, on February 12, 2013, just in time to resolve your President's Day shopping dilemmas. Here's a peek:

@newmanpictures

No more saying I hate brussel sprouts without trying them, first.

I finally joined Twitter. Mostly in a desperate attempt to halt the ageing process, and partly because everyone else is. And I'm still not sure what to do there. Rather, I'm still not sure what I SHOULD be doing there. So far, I've tweeted three times, which sounds exactly like what that phrase sounds like it should mean. I've tweeted, and all three Tweets continue to just sit there in a metaphorical basin, waiting for a metaphorical flush, or a metaphorical...what exactly is the bathroom-centric behavioral equivalent of someone reading and re-tweeting your Tweet? Is that question good fodder for a Tweet? Is fodder a good name for a Tweet that no one reads?

Sweet Zeus.

I've got a lot to figure out. It would be dangerous to let me do it alone.

a very special blog post iv: the necronomicon edition

Colin, from Decatur, Georgia, is the undisputed (and completely unchallenged) winner of The Great Shrinky-Dink Giveaway, the Fourth! And for the first time in this contests long and storied history, I received a "gift", in return: a wonderful poem, written by our winner, that I soon discovered is not a poem, at all, but some kind of wizard's incantation. How do I know this? The same way I always know when I've gazed upon forbidden lore: lightning, and lots of it, shooting out of my bloody eye sockets and killing everything I've ever loved. H-duh.

Please stick around for more chances to win a Shrinky-Dink (and perhaps other more substantial prizes) in the near future, which is really all we have left if this primordial text I'm reading is corre...GAH!

Rest in peace, Fido.

balloon

revenge of the great shrinky dink giveaway

Thirty-eight years ago (give or take), I started this thing on my blog called The Great-Shrinky Dink Giveaway, in which I Giveaway Dink-Shrinky, great. The.

Dammit.

Okay, it's like this: I gave a one-of-a-kind Shrinky Dink, with an illustration by yours truly, to the first person that sent an email to jeff@newmanpictures.com with the subject line "dink". If I had met that person in person, if I we had so much as looked at one another askance during the Color Me Badd show at the Worcester Centrum in 1991 (you know who you are), then they got zilch. If I hadn't, then they got a Shrinky-Dink. Now, I'm not gonna lie to you. We had some issues. Alternate timelimes. Pacts with Beelzebub. Shit like that. I don't want to get into it.

All you need to know is...free Shrinky-Dink! You're going to die, anyway. Might as well do it with an extra piece of plastic. Throw it on your miser-pile. Eat it. I don't care. Email me, win, and we'll work out the shipping details, later. Good luck, friends. And by friends, I mean complete strangers.

Newmanpicturesblog is in no way affiliated with Shrinky-Dinks or K & B Innovations, Inc., and is not responsible.

remember joe

rabbit's snow dance

Rabbit's Snow Dance, published by Dial Books for Young Readers, written by James and Joseph Bruchac, and illustrated by me, is in the can! The proverbial one. I don't think it belongs in the trash. I'm actually pretty fond of it. I hope you will be, too. Pick it up wherever you buy books on November 8, 2012.

cat and dog

cream soda

steven l. 3, volume 2

giant

lou

steven l. 2, volume 2

steven l. 1, volume 2

tuesday 2

After some (cursory) research, I still have no idea why books (not to mention albums and video games) are released on Tuesday. Is it because sales figures are tallied on Monday, making Tuesday the beginning of the retail week? Or is it because Tuesday sales are traditionally the lowest, and are therefore boosted by the purchase of new releases? The one website I looked to for this information couldn't say (I did say my research was cursory). However, there seemed to be a consensus between its forum members that a possible reason is "no one likes Mondays". Sure, why not.

The point is, buy my new picture book, Hand Book. It's available today, and here's what Kirkus Reviews, who gave it a star for merit, had to say about it:

Through simple drawings of hands in action, Newman deftly illustrates both the progress of a person’s life and the cyclical—and hopeful—nature of the human condition.

“One hand. / Two hands. / Two hands clap.” So begins this rhyming, universal tale about a child learning to live. He eats and swings, washes and waves, falls and gets up. As a teen, the boy studies and types; as a young man he soul-searches and job-seeks, feels defeat and accomplishment…and finds love. Newman’s two-word sentences, woven with his spontaneous, expressive drawings, lead to affecting phrasing that’s poignant and stirring. The line drawings, done in ink (or marker) with solid colors filling out the forms of the hands, are in an Al Hirschfeld– or Jules Feiffer–style of caricature or editorial illustration. Loads of white space allows the artwork to breathe; after one powerful pause, Newman returns to his opening lines, where childhood begins again, and the struggles and joys of life are reaffirmed.

A lovely tribute to growing up that will endearingly mature with its readers.

YOU: "Hey, that sounds pretty good. I think I'll go pick up a couple three."

ME: "No! It's too dangerous!"

YOU: "Trust me, doll."

ME: "You rogue!"

ME slaps YOU, storms off stage.

END OF ACT ONE

girl 2

swell

gary chocolate-bear will never meet freddy krueger

Gary Chocolate-Bear’s only desire was to box with and defeat Freddy Krueger in a third round knockout at Madison Square Garden on the 8th of May, 2019. So, he was pretty upset when the world exploded a full seven years before his dream could be realized.

As he and the rest of the Chocolate-Bears, who were understandably dead, slowly spun across the great expanse of the Milky Way, Gary wondered aloud what caused him to harbor such a ridiculous ambition in the first place.

“Eggs,” said the uninterred skeleton of Mussolini.
“No,” said Gary. “It can’t be that simple.”
Musskeletini sighed, “You’re right. I just hate to see you sad.”
Gary patted him on the spine. “You’ve always been a good friend.”

But you and I know Gary was only being kind. He’d never forgiven his companion for that one time with the thing and everything.

The End.

faun

killdren

ten gallon bird

man 2

i win

Got it. Thanks to everyone who voted.

two-star

The last thing I should do is the one voluntary function I am compelled to do. I read reviews of my books. All of them. Including the ones on Amazon.com where, at the moment, The Boys is one customer-click away from covering the star spread. I've got the five-stars, I've got the one-stars, and I've got everything in-between, except for the rarest and most elusive of all reviews, the two-star. The two-star review says "I hated this book, but liked the paper stock". It's the "I can't bring myself to kill this book, so I'll abandon it in a forest, instead" award. I want that award. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

tuesday

I'm happy to announce that The Boys will be released tomorrow, Tuesday, February 23. I have no idea where you'll be able to buy it in the real world, but you can always try the internet.

The Boys received an excellent, thorough review from Betsy Bird, over at A Fuse #8 Production, and a starred review in the latest issue of Kirkus Reviews. Unfortunately, I don't have a subscription to Kirkus, so I can't link to the full review. This is what it says:

It’s a new town for a baseball-loving protagonist. Newman wastes not a moment, setting the stage with the title page: A lone moving truck chugs along a house-lined street, skyscrapers looming above. A white spread possessing only one word, ‘Tuesday,’ greets readers, with single brush strokes and blocks of color denoting a glove, a ball, a bat and a solitary boy lacing up his shoes. But the anticipated game is not to be, as the shy hero watches the sport longingly from afar. Crest fallen, he sits by a set of elderly men, and baseball dreams are traded for books, then costumes, as the child determinedly tries to stay on the bench of retirees until the old-timer’s ball game reawakens the boy’s confidence. Effective visual storytelling realizes the aching love players can feel for the game, and in one lovely, lonely beat, the boy’s self-imposed rejection turns to resolve, as the tyke asks to join in a kids game. Through confident brushwork, done in a stylized 50s modern aesthetic, the artist’s images reveal sports’ deep truths about acceptance, a willingness to try and the intergenerational connections they bring.

I also participated in an interview at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Thanks, Jules, for having me as a guest.

On a personal note (which every post on this blog is, I guess) I want to say to my family and friends, and especially to my wife, Jodi, who, although she probably wouldn't describe herself this way, is the most patient person I've ever met, that I couldn't have finished The Boys without your encouragement.

I promise the next one won't take so long.

werewolf

soldier

pipe

wildebeest

gary chocolate-bear may have/might have eaten bread

Gary Chocolate-Bear, by a strange confluence of non-events, namely non-events of the never-eating-bread kind, had never eaten bread. At some point between when he first never ate bread, and when he, at the time of this story, which isn’t so much a story as it is not a story, had never eaten bread, Gary developed an irrational fear that America’s favorite sandwich bookends would, upon ingestion, turn him rabid. And when Mrs. Chocolate-Bear confronted her husband over breakfast about his peculiar belief by reciting Eleanor Roosevelt’s maxim that a person should do one thing that they fear to do every day of their lives, Gary simply responded that he was “sure she didn’t mean ‘eat bread’, though.”

Coincidentally, Gar (I call him Gar) was right. Eleanor Roosevelt, as Mrs. Choclolate-Bear was well aware, being an amateur Rooseveltologist, indeed meant everything but ‘eat bread’. Furthermore, she (Mrs. Chocolate-Bear, not Mrs. Roosevelt) knew that Eleanor Roosevelt meant everything but ‘eat bread’ because she herself (Mrs. Roosevelt, not Mrs. Chocolate-Bear) inexplicably contracted Rabies after eating what was evidently Rabies-inducing bread at her husband’s inaugural banquet. Mrs. Chocolate-Bear (not Mrs. Roosevelt), wisely, in my opinion, mentioned none of this to her husband, neither at that particular breakfast, nor at his inaugural banquent. Did I say banquent? I meant banquet.

Point is, Gary Chocolate-Bear never ate bread. Unless you consider a scone, bread.

Then, never mind.

The End.

litter

jekyll

hyde

legs

trap

live from the bottom shelf

It's up. Thanks, Minh!

wichita lineman

A few months ago, in the dead zone of Newmanpicturesblog, Minh Le, or rather, Roscoe P. Hargrove, over at Bottom Shelf Books posted a hilarious and weirdly insightful critical analysis of Hippo! No, Rhino that is one of the coolest souvenirs I've collected (insofar as one can collect a piece of the Internet) from my short children's book career. I emailed Minh to let him know how much I liked it, and that led to an interview that we just finished up last week, in which we talk about all sorts of things, including the song I want played at my funeral. It might be Wichita Lineman. And then again, it might not. I'll post a link once it's up.

box

i love your (my) blog

Since my writing skills have admittedly worsened in the last four months, I find it difficult to put into words my thanks to Matt Cordell for tagging me with this "I love your blog" award. And I mean it. I really can't remember which words to use, or how to string them together, grammatically. If anyone can help me construct a note of appreciation, you'll be rewarded with a letter from me, written by you, expressing my heartfelt gratitude.

Now, I don't know where this award originated, but it's an award, and that's good enough to satiate my ego demons until the next full moon. As I understand it, I now have to pass this award along to seven other blogs, or I will die.

Here are the blogs (asterisk = not safe for kids):

1) *The Adventures of Blanco Niño
2) *Things My Boyfriend Says (tragically cut short, presumably because the author stopped dating her boyfriend)
3) *Greenspeak
4) *Ralph Snart
5) The {Prefix}iest Thing I Saw Today
6) E is for Eric
7) John K Stuff

Of course, my love does cost a thing, so functioning blogs that I mentioned, listen up. According to the official rules crafted by the faceless and probably sinister entity that also created this award, rules which have been passed down through potentially thousands of anonymous hands, calling into question their very authenticity and value, you must:

1) Add the logo of the award to your blog
2) Add a link to the person who awarded it to you
3) Nominate at least seven other blogs
4) Add links to those blogs on your blog
5) Leave a message for your nominees on their blogs

Failure to comply will result in you not publicly admitting that you love other blogs. Not death. I lied about that to get you to do it.

neck

"the blasted treeline"

day two

God, this is hard.

But at least something happened to me yesterday, so I can write about that. If I can remember what is was. I mean, I know something happened. I made a mental note to the effect of "blog about this tomorrow", but I guess the note should have been about what it was, rather than its noteworthiness. Or maybe the note should have been half about the nature of the event, and half about its importance, because if I just remembered the event, instead of remembering to write about it, I'd be in the same boat I'm in now. Then again, if it was an event of note, I probably wouldn't need to remind myself to write about it. I'd just write about it.

What was I talking about?

writing season

You know how, when you stop doing something, like writing, for instance, or you only intermittently do that thing, like occasionally writing a dumb story about a family that goes to the moon, you start to forget how to do that thing. You know, like writing, for instance? Yeah, well, I didn't forget how to write. I just wanted to know if that's ever happened to you. That's all.

See, I can totally write. I just haven't. I just didn't want to for the past four months, because it was, like, summer and everything. And that's the only time I can do squat thrusts on the beach and bench and stuff. It ain't easy to write with your hands wrapped around sixty pounds of cold steel. That's sixty pounds in EACH HAND, btw. Go ahead, try it. I'll wait.

What'd I tell you, bro? I don't lie.

But now that it's fall, I might give this writing thing another go. If I don't find something better to do.

gun

doctor weaselbomb

chocolate-bears go to the moon

On Thursday morning, the papers announced that Gary Chocolate-Bear and his family would be the first Chocolate-Bears in space.

“Congratulations on the moon trip, Gary”, said Ronald Tewilliger, the Chocolate-Bears neighbor, as Gary was leaving for his job at the sewer factory.

“Thanks, Tewilliger”, replied Gary, and he drove into Tewilliger’s mailbox with his Hummer. The Hummer was Gary’s first big purchase from the endorsement money the Chocolate-Bears had received for winning the space contest. Oh, and he hated Tewilliger. That part is important since it would seem odd, based on their brief exchange, for Gary to have reacted in such a manner, unless it was an accident, which I’m telling you it wasn’t. He hated him. It doesn’t matter why.

The space contest, or the Space Race, as the Chocolate-Bears had come to call it, was just that: a race. So it really was neither strange nor clever that they referred to it as such. As it turns out, millions of Americans were doing the same thing, including most of the press. But by a rare coincidence, none of these people happened to know the Chocolate-Bears, nor did anyone in the family read the phrase in print, or hear it on television, so they were unaware that their "beats were stale", to quote a great, fictional doctor and part-time deejay.

Now, as I said, this contest, the contest won by the Chocolate-Bears, was a race, and in particular it was a race from Boston Harbor to the beaches of Peniche, Portugal, sponsored by Crest. The contestants were not allowed to use boats or planes, or any means of transportation other than their own limbs; however, they were allowed to carry with them as many tubes of toothpaste as they could manage. And it was this gift of hygiene that cost the lives of several hundred entrants, including the Chocolate-Bear’s youngest, Trudy, who, like her fellow departees, used her fingers to brush instead of swim. Mrs. Chocolate-Bear lamented the family’s loss in a brief, impromptu, floating funeral, claiming that “it was worse’n when somebody gits hit by a truck wearin’ durty drawers”, because, let’s face it, no tooth has ever been cleaned with a finger brush no matter how vigorous the scrubbing, and to meet one’s fate with a scuzzy mouth is probably the worst thing that could ever, ever happen to anyone, anywhere. But the Chocolate-Bears had entered the Space Race with great determination to win, and at all costs. And they did. I said that at the beginning of this story, and again in the first sentence of this paragraph.

And now the four Chocolate-Bears, previously known as the five Chocolate-Bears, were going to the moon. The moon, where seldom man has tread.

And they did.

The End.

mike and jeff

coyote

true story

I'm getting married in just over a week, so things have been pretty hectic, lately. On top of the typical wedding stuff that most couples have to deal with, Jodi and I are doing the design and signage work for the whole event, ourselves. Okay, Jodi's doing most of the design work. Okay, all of the design work. But I am contributing the cover of our ceremony program, a comic stip relating the bizarre but true story of how we met. It's a little ditty I call "Modern Love".

skull 3

double date

Last Wednesday, I drove down to Chicago to meet with Aaron Reynolds, who's writing the next book I'm illustrating, The Carnivore Club. We had a serious discussion about, among other things, animals wearing hats, and the comedic principle that a shark getting wheeled around in a bathtub is funnier than a shark walking on its fins (originally proposed by Sid Caesar, I believe), before heading out for dinner at a place called Carnivale. I always have a tough time distinguishing between various Latin cuisines, but the abundance of plantain and pork products on the menu clued me in that restaurant was probably Cuban-themed. In any case, they made the best raspberry mojito I've ever tasted. Yum.

The following Saturday, I was in the car again, this time heading to the fabled Brat Stop, where, for the second time, I lunched with my boy Matt Cordell. He brought along a couple of books by Saul Steinberg and Jean-Jacques Sempé that were just jaw-dropping, along with some samples of his own work which are nothing to sneeze at, either. Here's an image from his upcoming picture book, TOOT! TOOT! ZOOM! (written by Phyllis Root, to be published by Candlewick in the Spring of 2009):

home slice 1

reggie veggie head

Here's a little picture that slipped through the cracks during the whole Omro Oeuvre thing. My apologies to Mr. Wrage.

next

The Boys is in the can. My vacation is over. Work beckons. And now that contracts have been signed, I can finally talk about what's on my "to do" list for the next several months (and beyond).

First up is a picture book called The Carnivore Club. It's about a self-loathing trio of meat-eaters (including the Timber Wolf, below) that band together to confront their secret shame. I'm sure I'm making it sound funnier than it is.



Aaron Reynolds (Chicks and Salsa) is writing it, I'm (Hippo! No, Rhino) drawing it, and Chronicle Books is ponying up the cash to bind it all together in a flippable format. I'll be heading down to Chicago next week to meet the author for the first time (a rare opportunity in this business, especially when you live in the Midwest), so I'll be sure to report back on how it went.

After that comes my second book with Simon & Schuster (publisher of The Boys), which will either be called It's Mouse in the Morning...Starring Mouse!, or What's That Up Ahead?, depending on which idea gets the thumbs up from my editor. On the other hand, he could squash both of them, and send me back to the drawing board. But as I'm legally required to make another book for S&S, you can count on seeing something in the intervening years between now and the end of my life.

Last but not least, I'll be illustrating Joseph Bruchac's Rabbit's Snow Dance for Dial. Everything I know about this book I learned from the plot summary on my contract (it's the story of how the rabbit got its fluffy tail), which goes to show you the level of discrimination I exhibit when selecting jobs. Still, I hear the author's good, and snow is easy to paint.

More news as it develops.