– focuses on an absurd story, told by a father to his young daughter. The lavishly painted illustrations that abound in interpictorial references and are characterized by the Pop Art “aesthetics of boredom” (Alloway 1997, p. 170) contribute to the seeming “strangeness” of the nonsensical narrative (Kümmerling-Meibauer and Meibauer 2013).
Pop Art picturebooks represent a singular and time-limited corpus; however, together with the critical and leftist picturebooks of that time, they paved the way for an ever-growing awareness of crucial political, cultural, and societal aspects in the picturebooks to come. Picturebooks increasingly explored topics related to gender, race, disability, and age, thus scrutinizing traditional stereotypes and ideas. Publishers and policymakers increased their focus on authors and illustrators from underrepresented groups such as Native peoples, ethnic minorities, and immigrant communities. For example, the Coretta Scott King Medal, which was awarded for the first time in 1974, acknowledged the work of African American authors and illustrators, who were often overlooked by other award committees. Another prestigious award is the Children’s Africana Book Award (CABA), established in 1991 and presented to authors and illustrators for the best children’s books on Africa published or republished in the United States.
Picturebook-makers also addressed taboo topics, such as death and the atrocities of war, exploring often neglected issues in the genre. Picturebooks that come to mind here are John Burningham’s Granpa (1984), which deals with the death of a beloved person, and Toshi Maruki’s Hiroshima no Pika (1980), which addresses the bombing of Hiroshima. Correspondingly, Rose Blanche (1985), by Christophe Gallaz and Roberto Innocenti, is the first picturebook that focuses on the Holocaust. At the same time, parodies and newly adapted versions of popular fairy tales burst onto the picturebook market, such as Robert Munsch and Michael Martchenko’s The Paper Bag Princess (1980) and Babette Cole’s Princess Smartypants (1986), which play with fairy-tale gender stereotypes. Another pioneering picturebook is The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (1989), written by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith, which turned the original story topsy-turvy and initiated a trend that has not ceased yet.
Furthermore, at the end of the 1960s there emerged a new picturebook genre that has since become internationally popular. When the German illustrator Ali Mitgutsch published Rundherum in meiner Stadt (All Around in My Town) in 1968, the book was announced as a “Wimmelbuch” (wimmelbook), since the textless double spreads teem with characters and events. This picturebook genre demands specific reading strategies. Because of the many simultaneous actions and figures depicted in a setting, there is no prescribed reading direction. The viewer is totally free in their decision of which actions and figure(s) she wants to attentively observe in order to understand the small stories hidden behind. This activity reveals a playful character as it fosters the child’s ability to discover the connection between single events and characters (Rémi 2011). Akin to the wimmelbook is Martin Handford’s Where’s Wally? series (1987–1997, 7 vols; called Where’s Waldo? in North America), which offers a searching game, as the reader is asked to look for a certain character (Wally) on each double spread.
The wimmelbook and related book types belong to the swelling corpus of wordless (or textless) picturebooks, increasingly significant in the picturebook market since the 1980s. Wordless picturebooks encompass quite simple picturebooks, such as early concept books and concept books targeted at very young children, wimmelbooks, and sophisticated picturebooks that are based on visual narration, such as Lynd Ward’s The Silver Pony (1973), Tord Nygren’s Den röda tråden (1987; trans. The Red Thread, 1987), and Quentin Blake’s Clown (1995) (Beckett 2012; Bosch 2018). Prolific artist David Wiesner also specializes in wordless picturebooks, many of which have won international acclaim. He is the only picturebook artist to receive the Caldecott Medal three times, in 1991 for Tuesday (1991), in 2002 for The Three Pigs (2001), and in 2007 for Flotsam (2006), thus demonstrating that wordless picturebooks meet high aesthetic standards and tell an interesting story by means of a textless picture sequence.
Blurring the Boundaries between Art Forms, Media Formats, and the Audience
As unique as picturebooks are as an art form, they share a number of commonalities with related art forms. Comics and movies have frequently been a source of inspiration for picturebook artists; from the 1970s onwards, hybrid formats have developed at the intersection of picturebooks and comics, as is evident in the now classic In the Night Kitchen (1970) by Maurice Sendak, Father Christmas (1973) by Raymond Briggs, and Up and Up (1979) by Shirley Hughes. The page layout with multiple panels, the insertion of speech bubbles, the cartoon-like depiction of the characters and settings, the use of comic-specific symbols such as speed lines, and the preference for onomatopoetic expressions are just a few markers derived from comics and graphic novels. Some artists have used these devices to the extent that the boundaries between a picturebook and a comic seem to blur.
A special case is those picturebooks that are influenced by Japanese manga. Although popular among comics and manga aficionados since the 1970s, Japanese animation films (animes) and manga captured the international market in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. Some Western picturebook artists exemplarily referred to manga aesthetics in their artwork, the most prominent being Allen Say, who spent his childhood years in Japan and immigrated to the United States at the age of 16. Schooled by the renowned manga cartoonist Shinpei in Japan, Say created a wealth of picturebooks that are distinguished by a hybrid mixture of manga and Western aesthetics. This is evident in his first picturebook, The Boy of the Three-Year Nap (1988), with a text by Dianne Snyder, and also in the award-winning Grandfather’s Journey, published in 1993 (Kümmerling-Meibauer 2013).
Other picturebook artists turned toward film as a possible source of inspiration, using typical aspects associated with films to enhance the narrative and aesthetic quality of their books. Camera movements and camera perspectives dominate the wordless picturebooks by Istvan Banyai: Zoom (1995a) and Re-Zoom (1995b). Comparable to the zoom of a camera, each visual depicts settings, figures, and objects moving from close-up to middle distance and a panorama shot, thus revealing surprising and unexpected views. Different perspectives, such as worm’s eye view, bird’s eye view, and a view from the characters’ angle, distinguish the picturebooks by Chris Van Allsburg, such as Jumanji (1981) and The Polar Express (1985). Not surprisingly, both picturebooks featured as movies, the former as a live action film (released in 1995), the latter a live action-style movie created with the motion capture technique in 2004 (Tydecks 2018).
While the Van Allsburg adaptations created their own cinematic visual style, some picturebook stories were adapted into children’s movies that ventured to capture the atmosphere and illustrative style of the originals, such as Granpa (1989) and Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman (1993). Picturebooks are increasingly sources of transmediation, with books launching franchises, promoting a merchandising industry with toys, gadgets, and computer games. While this development initially focused on long-popular and canonized picturebooks, such as the Railway series by Rev. Awdry, the picturebooks on Curious George (1941–1966) by H.A. Rey and Margaret Rey, and the series on Pettson and Findus (1984–2012) by Sven Nordquist, newly released picturebooks created by prominent picturebook-makers are increasingly marketed as multimedia products from the beginning. This tendency swelled in the twenty-first century but predecessors are already discernible in the 1990s (Hamer 2018).
Intermedial references in picturebooks show just one side of the coin; from the 1970s onwards, picturebooks abound in interpictorial references, ranging from allusions to popular children’s cultural products, advertisements, and posters to prominent artworks displayed in museums and other public spaces. In this regard, Anthony Browne stands out as his picturebooks exuberate in interpictorial references, particularly to the Surrealist art of René Magritte (Lobato Suero and Hoster Cabo 2014). These references mainly serve to emphasize the characters’ emotions and inner lives, as displayed in Gorilla (1983), The Visitors Who Came to Stay (1984), with a text by Annalee McAfee, and Willy the Dreamer (1997).
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