New Spin: Celebrating the Release of “Battle Bunny”

by Wendy Lu
published in Reading

Imagine taking a sweet picture book about cats and then altering it completely – crossing out and penciling in new text, drawing over the illustrations and scribbling laser beams that shoot out from the cat’s eyes with a permanent marker.

Back when we were wildly imaginative kids, we did this to books all the time. And it’s exactly what New York Times bestselling authors Jon Scieszka and Mac Barnett did during a book tour one day.

“I prefer to think of it as ‘enhanced’ rather than ‘defaced’ storytelling, and I think it’s amazing,” Jon Scieszka says. “A second grader at a school I visited last month described it best: ‘It’s like you are reading and seeing two things at once, and it’s making a third thing that’s even better.’”

In our rapidly evolving book world, when we take one pre-existing story and incorporate our own plot twists and horror elements, it’s called a literary mash-up.

A few months after transforming that picture book about cats, Scieszka and Barnett decided to write a book in this fashion. They created a banal children’s story called Birthday Bunny and then turned it around and produced an entirely new story: Battle Bunny.

Battle Bunny, which releases this week, is a picture book about a bunny who acquires evil superpowers and becomes set on world domination, Barnett says.

“It was very important that the original Birthday Bunny work as a real story, albeit one that we would never write (or willingly read),” Barnett says. “We couldn’t just be setting ourselves up for jokes. So Jon and I sat on his deck and tried to write the most predictable, cliché-ridden picture book we could. We promised ourselves we would never take more than ten seconds to solve a plot problem. The most obvious choice always won. After that, the hard work started: turning the bad story into a good one.”

Like before, the co-authors went back and “Alex-ed” Birthday Bunny and rewrote the entire story, Scieszka says. The next step was finding an illustrator who could match the style of a literary mash-up visually. They chose Matthew Myers, whose illustrations have appeared in several picture books, including Tyrannosaurus Dad and Clink.

“We found Matt Myers because he was doing these great paintings where he took (found) art on the street and added his own touches in the same way we were doing with the text,” Scieszka says.

Myers, the illustrator for Battle Bunny, says he met with Scieszka, Barnett, and Justin Chanda, the editor, to brainstorm ideas. He began to sketch out two versions – a ‘before-alteration’ and an ‘after-alteration’ – of the book. All four of them met again to tweak the sketches that ultimately led to the creation of Battle Bunny. It was imperative to think of the two versions as separate books rather than an alteration of another, “to keep our sanity,” Myers says.

“My biggest hurdle was painting the bunny so that he looked sweet,” Myers says. “Because I knew how evil he would become, I kept sneaking malevolence into his face. Jon and Mac came by the studio and helped pull me back to cute and fluffy land.”

With a giant pencil and book-sized prints of the ‘before-alteration’ paintings to draw on, Myers incorporated the ‘after-alteration’ sketches – remembering all the while that keeping it simple is better for a book like Battle Bunny.

“Drawing like a kid was a real challenge,” he says. “I had to try and forget the rules of perspective and not do any shading. I love rendering with a lot of light and shadow, but kids don’t do that.”

Throughout the entire production process for the literary mash-up, the co-creators of Battle Bunny kept one question in mind: How would a kid do it?

“I think [literary mash-ups] might help kids imagine what any idea could be like if it was done differently,” Myers says. “Which hopefully will make them wonder how the book or movie or game they are looking at could be better. More demanding audiences will require better stories.”

Myers, Barnett and Scieszka agree that “mash-ups” like Battle Bunny aren’t some newfangled idea – they’ve been around for centuries in various forms such as graffiti and marked-up textbooks.

“Fairy tales have always been re-told by the teller to suit the audience,” Scieszka says. “Mac and I enjoy the literary postmodernists like Cervantes and Sterne and Borges and Barth and Pynchon and Wallace. We just bring that sensibility (and, in Bunny’s case, a healthy dose of surrealists and Duchamp and Banksy) to the kids’ book world. And no one is a better audience for this flexible narrative thinking than kids.”

As they prepare for the Battle Bunny book tour, the co-creators are also working on new separate projects. Barnett, who loves “playing around with genre and bending convention,” says readers can expect a new picture book in the future called President Taft is Stuck in the Bath. While Myers’ current project requires a style of illustration that’s different from Battle Bunny, he says he’s willing to work on another mash-up if the story fits. As for Scieszka? “[There’s] no telling what I might do next,” he says.

Scieszka says creating literary mash-ups helps writers to expand their minds, while genuinely having fun and keeping your audience in mind are key.

“Don’t do this because you read somewhere (like here) that it is the latest thing to do,” Scieszka says. “Go read your stories to your intended audience. Make sure your story engages, entertains, and maybe educates them. Then you can figure out later what you might call your story.”

JonScieszka

 

Jon Scieszka is the creator of Trucktown, including the New York Times bestselling Smash, Crash!, and the author of The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!, the Time Warp Trio series, Caldecott Honor Book The Stinky Cheese Man, and many other books that inspire kids to want to read. He has worked as an elementary school teacher and is the founder of GuysRead.com, a literacy initiative for boys.

 

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MacBarnett (1)

 

Mac is a New York Times bestselling author of books for children, including Extra Yarn, which won a 2013 Caldecott Honor, the 2012 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award. He also writes the Brixton Brothers series of mystery novels. Visit him at his website, macbarnett.com, or on Twitter @macbarnett.

 

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MatthewMyers (1)Matthew Myers’ career as a children’s book illustrator began in 2011 with two starred reviews: Publisher’s Weekly, which named him a Flying Start, and Kirkus, which said: “Myers’ oil paintings truly amaze.” Since then he has illustrated several books, including Clink, Tyrannosaurus Dad, A is For Musk Ox, Musk Ox Counts, Bartholomew Biddle and the Very Big Wind, EIEIO!, and Battle Bunny. He lives and works in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can see his illustrations and fine art at myerspaints.com and facebook.com/MatthewMyersPainter.

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author_photo Wendy Lu is co-editor of The Durham VOICE and the entertainment editor at Blue & White magazine. She is also a former book publishing intern and a NaNoWriMo 2008 winner. Her work has appeared in The Daily Tar Heel, The Collegiate Scholar and Chapel Hill Magazine’s The WEEKLY. She blogs about creativity and happiness at wendyluwrites.blogspot.com.

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