These are not graphic novels: Patrick McDonnell's children's books (Pt. 2)

It’s been a few weeks since we took a look at a few of Mutts cartoonist Patrick McDonnell’s children’s books, but I’ve since managed to track down the other half of his growing bibliography—his very first picture book, and his very latest one.

His first book was The Gift of Nothing (Little, Brown; 2005), which, like Just Like Heaven, was a Mutts picture book in the sense that the strip’s stars Mooch and Earl are front and center throughout.


The format of the book, the layout of McDonnell’s pictures, and the relationship between the words and art are also pretty much identical to those in Just Like Heaven.

Visually, the biggest distinguishing factor between the two is that Gift seems to be much rougher, with a hastier, scribblier line than even in McDonnell’s daily strips.

The art is black and white save for dashes of very light reds, which look like red water color added to the details in brush and ink drawings. I don’t know if that’s what the bits of red are, mind you, that’s just what they look like to me.

As for the story, it’s quite similar to Just Like Heaven in that it is at once completely straightforward, but with a gently pushed moral to be experienced.

“It was a special day” we learn on the first page, and Mooch wants to get a gift for his best friend Earl. McDonnell’s coy about what special day it is—perhaps too coy for a cynical adult like myself who has heard a few rants too many about secular society’s war on Christmas—but the snowy setting and the number of shoppers Mooch encounters in the stores suggests Christmas to me. That, or perhaps Earl’s birthday just falls during December.

Anyway, Mooch is fairly stymied as to what to get Earl, since Earl already has a bowl,a bed, a chewy toy, a master and a house.

“What do you get someone who has everything?” the text asks, above a picture of Mooch emanating a cloud of 25 question marks.

He comes to a very different conclusion than Mongul, Wonder Woman and Batman:


Thus the middle of the book deals with Mooch searching for nothing in all of the places he suspects it might be, only to find inevitably find something there instead.

Finally, he gets a big box, puts nothing in it, and gives it to Earl.

McDonnell overreaches a bit rhetorically to get a happy ending, when Mooch has to add “but me and you” to the end of the “nothing” Earl finds in the box, but it’s a nice thought and it’s the thought, in pictures books as much as gift-giving, that counts.

There’s a charming quality to the story and semantic jokes, but, as with his other books and the strips of his I’ve read, the thing I enjoy most in this is McDonnell’s line work.

Well, that, and the way he perfectly conveys the behavior of pets in a way that is perfectly familiar to anyone who’s ever had one.

Like, Earl’s very dog-like expression of excitement while engaging in the human activity of opening a present:




Or Earl and Mooch’s enjoyment of the box and string:




Finally, this fall McDonnell released his latest picture boo, Hug Time (Little, Brown; 2007):



This is probably his best looking of the four books. The format and layout are identical to the other Mutts picture books, but the art is much less spare, and more brightly colored, in what appears to be water colors. McDonnell’s art here looks extremely warm, which is appropriate, given the subject matter. You know, hugs.

The mutt that stars here is the little tiger cat from the strip who talks about endangered species. I’ve seen him called Shtinky Puddin in the strip, but here he goes by Jules. Little girl Doozy appears on a few pages, and Earl, Mooch and the fat tiger cat Noodles all appear on one page.

The story, in summary, sounds darling. And it was, in fact, a Publisher’s Weekly summary of the book as the tale of a cat who wants to travel the entire world and hug every single endangered animal by the artist of Mutts is what originally sparked my interest in McDonnell’s non-comics work last month.

It’s a neat premise, although the book itself is a little less steam-lined. Operating on child-like logic that hugs make everything better, Jules wants to hug the whole world, which means traveling every inch of it and hugging everybody and thing in it.

“So he made (and checked twice) a Hug To-Do List,” hugged his owner and friends and then sets off to hug the animals of Africa, a blue whale, the elusive tiger, “a gnu, a panda, a peacock, a petite pudu. A wallaby, wombat and a humuhumu fish (number three hundred six on his Hug To-Do List).”

Oh yeah, it’s told in rhyme. And not particularly good rhyme. McDonnell’s rough couplets lead to some awkward construction in his narration, but its sing-song enough to pass muster in a kids book.

While I groaned at the words quite often (remaining aware that I am not exactly the target audience here), I enjoyed the over all arc of the story and the point it was getting at. And then, as always, there’s that great artwork.

It was actually quite a treat to see McDonnell working on animals so far out of his normal oeuvre. I’d love to see him do more work in wombats, for example.

Here’s Jules trying to hug a butterfly, which looks an awful lot like trying to catch a butterfly, doesn’t it?



Here he is in the park, hugging a bird:


I love the expressions on the birds’ faces, all identical to the hugged bird’s. Apparently, they’re all as confused as him. This is a perfect image to demonstrate what I like most about McDonnell’s work.

The birds have no mouths or eyebrows, their faces consist simply off two little dots above a beak, and yet the dots are so perfectly placed and drawn that, in the context of the image, the birds all seem to have the same stunned, blank expression.

As do the birds on the next page,


looking over at the weird little cat in the sweater hugging that little blue bird.

These are not graphic novels: Patrick McDonnell's children's books

Since today is a Wednesday without comic books, it seems like a good day to blog about something other than comics—in this case a couple of children books which are written and drawn by a cartoonist.

Patrick McDonnell is probably best known for his daily striip Mutts, a domestic comedy about a couple of pets, including dog Earl and cat Mooch.

It's been a while since I've spent any serious quality time with a Mutts collection, but I remember it well enough that I'm confident in saying that in just about any funnies page which it appears, it's probably one of (if not the) best strips there. McDonnell is, simply put, a hell of a cartoonist, one who gets an unbelievable amount of information and emotion out of the very few lines he puts down per panel.

He's created four children's books so far, and I wouldn't be surprised if he continues to make more, based on the quality of the work and the reception they've received. Tonight, we'll take a look at two of them.

First up is the lesser of the two, Art (Little, Brown; 2006).


This is a very, very slight book, one that could easily have been reduced to the size of, say, a one page comic strip, but then, it is a children's picture book. It's about art, with both a capital A and a lower-case one.

Here are the first two pages, for a clearer idea of what I mean:





That's followed by one mixing the two images, captioned "Art and his art." See, Art is an artist.

After that set-up, the book is dominated by images of Art running around the big, open, white spaces of the squarish-pages, usually featuring a single image and phrase per page, drawing, painting and coloring. These pages are visually interesting, but don't really contain much information or story, beyond showing Art drawing.

The drawings are quite nice though. Here's a detail of one page, in which Art draws a dog:




If you've ever tried it, you know there's nothing harder than drawing something that looks like a little kid drew it. I really like McDonnell's attempt here. It's clearly his art, and yet it's made primitive enough to seem like the work of, say, a young McDonnell.

Anyway, the bulk of the book is just McDonnell messing around, spending time on Art messing around, but here's the Awww-inducing punchline, which I'm about to spoil here. Art's mother puts his work up on the refrigerator door. Why?



Another of McDonnell's children's books is Just Like Heaven (Little, Brown; 2006).


This is a picture book featuring the Mutts stars, and appears to be based on a few strips from the Mutts strip (Examples here).

Mooch takes a nap under a tree, and while he's asleep, a fog rolls in. When he wakes up, he finds himself suddenly surrounded by clouds and comes to what must seem like an obvious conclusion to the mind of a child (or the child-like mind of a cat):



From there, Mooch explores the world around him, the supposition that he's in heaven coloring his perception of it, so that the little everyday details seem both more dramatic and more benevolent. Part of it is merely appreciating what usually goes unappreciated because it's thought to be mundane rather than divine, but it also allows Mooch to confront problems. For example, when a chained bulldog begins barking at him, his first thought was to run away, unitl he wondered how barking bulldog/cat relations go in heaven, and he ends up hugging the problems away.

Like the very best childrens' books, it's both simple and beautiful in its message and in its execution. Each page is pretty airy, and used like one giant panel of a comic strip. A usually rather small image fills the lower portion of the page, the edges bleeding into the whiteness of the page or the gray clouds of the fog, while short, declarative text runs across the top. McDonnell's art is, as usual, almost calligraphic in its simplicity, and appears even more so in this book than in the comic strips, where his lines are more crowded by the tiny boxes. Here, the boxes are gigantic, giving even greater power to his few well-chosen lines.

This is a children's book that belongs on every child's book shelf. And, I imagine, most adult's.