Cybils Award Winners for 2010 (with a few comments)

The 2010 Cybils Award list was announced this morning. I wasn’t involved in the judging, unlike past years, because of a big writing deadline. But I’m pleased to see the judges liked some of the books that struck me over the past few months, whether or not I got around to writing about them. And I’m delighted to have the whole lists of winners and nominees to consider in the months and years ahead.

And the winners are…

Fiction Picture Books
Interrupting Chicken, by David Ezra Stein

Nonfiction Picture Books
The Extraordinary Life of Mark Twain (According to Susy), by Barbara Kerley

Easy Readers
We Are in a Book!, by Mo Willems

Short Chapter Books
Zapato Power: Freddie Ramos Takes Off, by Jacqueline Jules; illustrated by Miguel Benitez

Poetry
Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reversible Verse, by Marilyn Singer, illustrated by Josée Masse
Nifty. Singer uses our familiarity with classic fairy tales to sum up some of those stories in “reversos,” free-verse poems that read the same whether from first line to last, or last line to first. As a bonus, the reversos usually provide a new perspective on the tales: from a different character, or a different point in time. Masse’s illustrations expand on the themes of mirroring and symmetry.

Graphic Novels
Meanwhile: Pick Any Path. 3856 Story Possibilities, by Jason Shiga
I wrote about Shiga as a “math cartoonist” back here, and about the possibilities of branching paths in traditional comics here. Meanwhile has gotten most of its attention for its algorithmic structure. However, the crazy scientific devices that the hero encounters also leave readers with interesting logical questions. For example, if you have a machine that wipes everything out of existence, can you ever experience having pushed that button?

Fantasy & Science Fiction
The Shadows: The Books of Elsewhere, Vol. 1, by Jacqueline West

Middle Grade Fiction
The Strange Case of Origami Yoda, by Tom Angleberger
I admire any author who can find fun in middle school. Another interesting aspect of this novel is the notion, raised by some readers, that one crucial character has Asperger’s syndrome. The past decade has brought a number of fine books touching on that condition, some with “Aspie” protagonists figuring out the world and others with protagonists living with “Aspie” relatives. Here the character, if indeed he qualifies, is simply one of many quirky kids in the quirky middle-school culture.

Young Adult Non-fiction
The Secret of the Yellow Death: A True Story of Medical Sleuthing, by Suzanne Jurmain

Young Adult Graphic Novels
Yummy; The Last Days of a Southside Shorty, by G. Neri, illustrated by Randy DuBurke
My still-somewhat-in-shock review here, and remarks on how Randy DuBurke worked with his collaborators here.

Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction

Rot & Ruin, by Jonathan Maberry

Young Adult Fiction
Split, by Swati Avasthi

Comics and Children’s Publishing—When Worlds Collide

As traditional children’s publishers issue material in comics form, their editors are being challenged to develop new skills and working methods. A couple of web interviews this month gave hints at managing the creative process.

First, at the Brown Bookshelf, Randy DuBurke describes his work on Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty, scripted by G. Neri. With experience drawing mainstream comics that goes back to DC in the late 1980s (I think I have some of the issues of Action Comics that he contributed to), DuBurke was the veteran on this project:

Jennifer Fox at Lee and Low Books…contacted me partly because this was their first foray into graphic novels and since I had experience in doing comics they thought it would be a good idea if I worked on the project. . . .

Before I started, I told my editor I would need to make changes along the way, which is not unusual when doing stories for comics. Comic book stories are collaborations between the artist and writer. I did change some scenes to strengthen the visual impact. Once the page art was completed, Greg and our editor would do a rewrite to accommodate the changes if necessary.

Meanwhile, over at Cynsations, artist Neil Numberman writes about creating the art for the Joey Fly, Private Eye comics, scripted by Aaron Reynolds. One of his responsibilities is “to thumbnail the entire book”:

There’s a good reason they call these sketches "thumbnails," but even though they’re super tiny, they do give me a number of things I need to know before starting the real sketches. They help me pace out the entire book, to make sure scenes and act breaks end at the end of a page or spread. I also need to roughly figure out where everyone in the scene will be and their word balloons, in each panel. . . .

Our editor, Reka Simonsen, always requests to see these little thumbnails. I love that she wants to be so involved in the process, and she claims she loves looking at my thumbnails, but I have no idea how she gets anything from these sloppy little drawings.

That step was especially important in this project because Reynolds did not specify page turns, as his sample script shows. That’s how picture books are created; it’s up to the artist to decide what goes on which page. In contrast, comics scripts usually state where the page breaks fall, and often other details about page layout.

It struck me that neither DuBurke nor Numberman mentions interacting directly with their scripters. For example, Numberman describes a later stage like this:

So, after the sketch stage, I hand ’em over to Reka, and she hangs onto them for a month or two, making notes and passing them around to other folks at the publisher, so when I get it back, I have a giant printout of the entire book, with little stickie notes on them.

The editors of these two books appear to be working as children’s-book editors have usually done, standing between author and artist. In contrast, writers in mainstream comics—at least the more successful ones who get asked to write introductions to their collections—often describe direct interaction with their artists. They sometimes approach publishers as a team, and comics scripts can contain notes directly to the artist, though the editor is always in the loop.

There’s no evidence to suggest that one method is preferable to the other, or usually produces better results. Rather, these two parts of the publishing industry have different cultures, but now they’re starting to overlap.

Yummy: There Is No Rosebud Here

I remembered the case of Robert “Yummy” Sandifer from 1994 before reading Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty. I didn’t remember the boy’s name, but I remembered the news reports about an eleven-year-old killer on the run, eventually found murdered by his own gang in a tunnel.

I therefore knew how the title character’s story would end in Yummy, the comics-style retelling of that episode by G. Neri and Randy DuBurke. Younger readers might not, despite the phrase “Last Days” in the subtitle and the mention of death on the front flap.

G. Neri structures the narrative to maintain that suspense. It begins with Yummy Sandifer shooting a teen-aged girl, then circles back to his upbringing, entrance into gang life, and early crimes. When we return to the shooting, the story seems to have caught up with its telling. Though still in the past tense, there’s no sign of what’s to come.

The narrator Roger is another boy about Yummy’s age, a fictional neighbor and classmate. But he comes from a normative American family: mother, father, one other sibling. But we also see that Roger’s older brother was the member of the Black Disciples gang who recruited Yummy.

Like the reporter in Citizen Kane, Roger undertakes to find out more about Yummy, asking neighbors and friends. He describes his own encounters with the boy, who has sometimes seemed abused, sometimes a bully, sometimes just another kid. Neighbors share contradictory thoughts about Yummy and his behavior.

Unlike Orson Welles’s film, however, Yummy ends without an answer, even a facile one. (Citizen Kane was always more about audacious storytelling than about its story.) We never learn what made Yummy so much more violent than other “shorties,” or exactly why he shot two people on one August day.

We do, however, get a sense that Roger’s family has helped to keep him from that path. There’s even a family reconciliation at the end, providing the requisite “sense of hope.” But for the questions the narrator asks about Yummy Sandifer and the girl he killed, there are no adequate answers.

The artwork fits that stark story. Randy DuBurke’s panels are all in black and white; he uses hatching to create the illusion of grays, but there are no washes or half-tones. It’s a high-contrast world full of shadows and looming perspectives, with spindly-legged kids running for their lives.

(These comments based on a review copy sent by the publisher, Lee & Low Books.)