Komodo!
Peter Sis
Green Willow Books (1993)
Peter Sis is another one of those creative souls who has range and style! In some ways, he reminds me a little of Steve Kellogg. His books have tons of detail and fun stuff hidden within the pages. Hey readers, sorry for the length of this post, but there are too many interesting things about this guy.
Komodo! is about a boy and his parents who go to visit a Komodo dragon in Indonesia. His parents find it touristy and annoying, but the little boy goes off by himself for a few minutes and runs right into a dragon (or is it his imagination?).
The first page is an illustration of hundreds of children lined up for a school picture. The text says, "it is always easy to find me in school pictures because of my dragon T-shirt." Of course, Mirette and I madly search for the kid with the dragon shirt and, truth be told, she found it before I did. There are also a lot of interesting perspectives, some as if you are in an airplane looking down on a crowd of people.
Peter Sis wrote another book called Madlenka that I really like and almost previewed for this blog. It's about a little girl who has a tooth that is falling out. She goes around her NYC block to tell her grown-up friends and it's almost as if she has gone around the world. It's a charming book with cut outs and the pleasure of having to turn the book around to read some of the text. Yet, it is a little bit, well, insensitive in that her friends include a French baker, an Italian ice cream truck driver, a German storyteller, an Asian shopkeeper, a Latin American grocer. The criticism is that Europe got divided out into several different countries while the Asian shopkeeper sells all Asian things lumped together and the Latin America grocer has little pictures on the side that are supposed to depict all of Latin America. Included under people is a picture of a native with bow and arrow in a loin cloth.
I guess this is yet another reminder to look closely at our literature and the secret messages it conveys to our children. I have no doubt in my mind that Peter Sis was writing a book to celebrate diversity, but in the end it's a little bit offensive.
His work includes wonderfully simple books like Fire Truck and Ballerina, artistically compelling books like Tibet Through the Red Box and a visual memoir of his life in Czechoslovakia called The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain (a book I incidentally gave to a friend for a birthday gift because I thought it was so interesting).
As mentioned above, Peter Sis grew up in Czechoslovakia during the cold war. (You must read his memoir--it's fascinating). He had a thing for Western culture--beat poets, the Rolling Stones etc. His father was a film maker and his mother an artist. He followed suit in both those directions with awards in both film making and illustrations. I can only imagine his delight when he collaborated with Bob Dylan.
He came to Los Angeles in 1982 to make a film for the Olympics. The Eastern bloc decided to ban the Olympics and he was told to come home. Instead he was granted asylum and somehow met up with Maurice Sendak who helped him with his career. He has done a ton of stuff like designing a set for the Joffrey Ballet and creating the poster for the movie Amadeus. He currently lives in New York with his two children.
His official website: http://www.petersis.com/index2.html
Wow, totally fascinating: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/01/05/sunday/main261975.shtml
Cool Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LovauoreX_k
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