Picturing an Author-Illustrator as Her Book

Here’s a nice quote from John Rocco, artist of the upcoming picture-book biography Big Machines: The Story of Virginia Lee Burton, written by Sherri Duskey Rinker. Burton was known to friends and relatives as “Jinnee.”

At first it was hard to wrap my head around the idea of illustrating a book about another children’s book artist without just showing her drawing…

But a lot of Jinnee’s personality came through as I went through her sketches and books. I suddenly realized that she was the embodiment of The Little House. She had an appreciation for technology and moving forward, but was much more closely tied to a simpler life. To portray her symbolically as her book’s little house, which was surrounded by daisies, I pictured Jinnee wearing a skirt emblazoned with daisies.

And when I learned that she was a dancer, I wanted her dancing across the page as she created her art, and tried to capture the sense of flow and movement across the pages of her own books, and to pay homage to her meticulous sense of design.

Rocco is quoted in this Publishers Weekly article about the new book and reissues of two of Burton’s picture books, including The Little House.

Virginia Lee Burton’s Kids Comic

Yesterday I showed a sequential-art print that Virginia Lee Burton created about 1940 for new colleagues in her Folly Cove Designers cooperative. We know she was studying the comics form around that time because the next year she published Calico the Wonder Pony, or the Saga of Stewy Stinker, an attempt to create a picture book that could compete with comic books for her sons’ attention. (A decade later, Burton was able to go back to Calico, rework some of the pictures, and reattach her original title; that’s the form available today.)

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt quotes Burton as saying: “Calico the Wonderhorse I did for both Aris and Mike in an attempt to wean them away from comic books.” In Virginia Burton: A Life in Art, Barbara Elleman quoted her as saying: “I really dislike the comic books for their lack of design and drawing more than anything.”

But she steeled herself to research the form of adventure comics, coming to these conclusions for The Horn Book:

the hero must be endowed with more than the average physical and mental powers, besides being all that was chivalrous and virtuous, and the villain the antithesis. There must be action, suspense, and tremendous but possible odds against the hero, but no one must get seriously hurt. Humor was welcome. Westerns were the most popular.

Curiously, Western comics weren’t flourishing in 1941, except as spin-offs of cowboy movies. But they may have been popular in Burton’s house; she recalled letting her boys listen to The Lone Ranger on the radio.

Elleman wrote that “In making her horse, Calico, female, Burton felt she was giving a tongue-in-cheek poke to Western comics, where women were mostly ignored.” That said, Burton had already established her habit of making her main non-human characters female.

Burton’s comments on comic books indicate she was assessing their content, not just their form. Thus, she came up with an exaggerated, fast-moving, action-filled, Manichean adventure. Calico contains sequential, juxtaposed images, one of the hallmarks of the comics form. But otherwise it seems to tell its story through a standard picture-book technique: third-person narration, set off in plain text from the illustrations. Nonetheless, the Burton family labeled Calico a “symphony in comics.”

The book’s original reviews were mixed. Parents said it “meets the sensational comics on their own ground,” while Bangor librarian L. Felix Ranlett wrote in The Horn Book, “We like our funnies and our books kept separate and we don’t know whether Calico is a book or a funny.” (As late as 2002, biographer Elleman wrote that the comics technique “is not often seen in today’s trade books.”)

Last year, James Sturm of Vermont’s Center for Cartoon Studies called Burton “Godmother of the Graphic Novel” in a slide show at DoubleX. He referred not just to Calico but also to The Little House and her more successful books. Peggy Burns at Drawn and Quarterly agreed with Sturm’s assessment while Tom Spurgeon at the Comics Reporter thought he hadn’t made his case. Heidi MacDonald’s The Beat archived the resulting debate and prolonged it.

Virginia Lee Burton’s Adult Comic

This weekend I attended what I might call my first and last academic conference about fashion, co-sponsored by the Costume Society of America and the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife.

Elena M. Sarni gave a presentation about Folly Cove Designers, a Cape Ann cooperative of designer-craftsmen who created prints, home goods, and clothes starting in 1940. Their leader was Virginia Lee Burton, also author-illustrator of Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel and The Little House.

Each designer submitted her or (in rare cases) his design to a jury of experienced members for approval. After a person finally had her first design accepted, Burton gave her a wall hanging printed with a series of vignettes about printmaking.

I’m showing a detail of Burton’s print here. Life magazine published the whole thing in 1945, and it appeared in a brochure that Folly Cove Designers issued to market their work.

The print fits my definition of the comics form. It’s made up of sequential, juxtaposed images, showing a printmaker in action from her search for inspiration through making the final print (by jumping on a linoleum block, in the absence of a press). The question marks in the top vignettes are elements of written language working with the images to tell the story; those punctuation marks become graphic elements of the whole, and they “show the invisible” by symbolizing the artist’s puzzlement.

TOMORROW: Burton’s attitude toward comics.

Revisiting the Builder of The Little House

I was always a bigger fan of the Caldecott-winning The Little House than of Virginia Lee Burton's more popular book, Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel. I may have been attracted to the notion of historical change that forms the storyline of The Little House, and not that impressed by Mike's poor project planning.

A long-time Oz and Ends reader alerted me to Jean Nathan's article about Burton in the May issue of Vogue magazine. I can't find that story online, and I worry that if I delve too deeply into the Style.com website it will start to smell of perfume, like the magazine. But Burton fans should look for this article in libraries.

The fashion magazine takes note of Burton because she was the head of a design cooperative named after her neighborhood of Folly Cove, on Cape Ann. Its fabrics and garments are apparently quite collectible. The article also refers to a recent film, Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place.

On biographical details, Nathan goes well beyond the biography of Burton on Houghton Mifflin's website. It reveals, for example, that after Burton's mother left her father, she and her siblings spent a long time in foster care. It's no wonder that when Burton found a place for her own family, she clung to it.

Nathan writes that all of Burton's picture books have "anthropomorphized female protagonists." I knew that Mike Mulligan's steam shovel was named Mary Anne, and that Burton also wrote about a tractor named Katy, a cable car named Maybelle, and a locomotive named Choo Choo. I didn't recall the Little House having a gender, however. But I guess she does.