Apr 23, 2022
if anyone knows anything about Hiro (2005) dir. Matthew Swanson, please tell me everything you know
seen from United Kingdom
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Israel
seen from Mexico
seen from Israel
seen from Israel
seen from Israel
seen from Israel
seen from Russia
seen from Netherlands
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Israel
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from Netherlands
seen from Venezuela
seen from Singapore
seen from Russia
if anyone knows anything about Hiro (2005) dir. Matthew Swanson, please tell me everything you know
https://youtu.be/15UziDTI1Ak
Ten Reasons to Read The Real McCoys: Two’s a Crowd by Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr
Matthew: Hello, I’m Matthew Swanson, author of The Real McCoys series.
Robbi: And I’m Robbi Behr, the illustrator.
M: We are married. We have created many children.
R: We have created four children. Does that count as many?
M: Oh yes. In fact, I was going to say “so many.”
R: I appreciate your restraint.
M: We are here to talk about Two’s a Crowd, the second book of The Real McCoys, a critically acclaimed, densely illustrated middle grade mystery by Robbi and me.
R: “Critically acclaimed”? Where is your restraint now?
M: Our editor Erin insists that we put our best foot forward.
R: How about “kids seem to like it, and so do a handful of adults who write reviews?”
M: I can live with that.
R: What were we talking about again?
M: Two’s a Crowd. We are supposed to tell these people ten things about it.
R: Will it be a problem if we only come up with nine?
M: If that happens, I will dig deep and heroically come up with a tenth.
R: This is pretty much why I keep you around. Alright, let’s do this thing.
1) THIS BOOK IS THE LOVE CHILD OF A GRAPHIC NOVEL AND A CHAPTER BOOK
R: That seems like an inappropriate way to describe a children’s book.
M: Yes, but I thought you’d like that.
R: I totally do. And it’s so true! But I’ll let you explain what we mean.
M: Two’s a Crowd is a densely illustrated 336-page illustrated novel with a ton of interaction between image and words. It has some of the conventions of graphic novels but is technically part of the new genre of “hybrid” novels, according to the cutting-edge librarians we know.
R: It’s not broken into panels, for example.
M: And it has a running narrative that could stand on its own without the illustrations. But there are some speech bubbles, and lots of hand lettering, and illustrations that bleed into the words and that literally knock the characters over from time to time.
R: Bottom line is, there are lots of illustrations and lots of words.
M: Almost 1,000 illustrations! Robbi also did the page design and typesetting. She basically created a 336-page picture book.
R: Robbi did not sleep for six months. Alright. Next item!
2) IT IS FUNNY
R: That’s really more of an opinion than a fact.
M: Fair enough.
R: But yes. WE think it’s funny.
M: What in particular do you find funny about it?
Robbi: I think it’s mostly in the way you say things. The way you say things is not normal.
M: Is that a compliment?
Robbi: Absolutely. I think funny comes from being pleasantly surprised. For example, at one point you write “It’s as if Emily has told me she’s about to share a slice of pizza with a werewolf.” To me, trying to imagine what that actually looks like is funny. Until I read the manuscript for this book, I hadn’t read a metaphor anywhere involving both a werewolf AND a piece of pizza. And then I got the pleasure of drawing Emily as the werewolf in conversation with Moxie as the piece of pizza. For some reason, it cracks me up every time I read it.
M: You are very gratifying.
Robbi: I can’t help it. The book is full of moments like that.
Matthew: Alright. I guess you have either proven or entirely disproven point number two. Onwards.
3) IT’S HEARTWARMING
M: Ok, so what is heartwarming about this series?
R: I think Moxie is so well-intentioned but also so flawed that she just makes you love her. And she manages to be wildly overconfident while also being quite aware that she’s not perfect. She’s such a walking disaster that your heart aches with her every misstep. But she believes in herself and what she’s doing so deeply that you’re always rooting for her to succeed.
M: I think you did it! I also think the relationship between Moxie and her little brother Milton is worth mentioning. At the beginning of Two’s a Crowd, Moxie doesn’t think much of Milton, but as he helps her puzzle through the book’s mystery, she comes to realize how smart and insightful he is. And how much she needs him.
R: I also have a soft spot for the screaming muffin on page 224.
M: And how is the screaming muffin heartwarming?
R: It’s not, really, but I wanted to bring him up and wasn’t sure where else I was going to be able to fit him in. I’m sure he has his own heartwarming backstory somewhere.
M: Ok, so we’re already going off the rails here. What is the fourth thing?
4) IT HAS A STRONG FEMALE ROLE MODEL.
R: This is true. Her name is Principal Jones. She is all business and no nonsense and tough and capable and very good at her job. She runs a tight ship at Tiddlywhump Elementary. And yet she’s kind and thoughtful and isn’t dismissive of Moxie’s shenanigans. She loves Moxie, but knows Moxie needs a little tough love and gives her some. PJ is the absolute best.
M: She really is.
5) IT HAS SHINY DELIGHT ON THE COVER
R: I love shiny delight!
M: Should we tell them what shiny delight is?
R: It is shiny! And delightful! I love to run my finger across it!
M: “Shiny delight” is how Robbi refers to the glossy varnish our art director Natalie used on the cover of Two’s a Crowd to draw attention to the most important design elements. It is not actually called “shiny delight.”
R: SHINY!
M: It is called an “aqueous coating” or some such thing.
R: DELIGHT!
M: I think it’s time for the next thing.
6) KIDS CAN’T SEEM TO PUT THESE BOOKS DOWN
R: Apparently, this is true.
M: We created this series because it was exactly the book we wanted to make. We are delighted with how it turned out. But the question remained: would actual kids like it?
R: Since book 1 came out last November, many people have sent us photos of kids refusing to put down the book while eating breakfast and other photos of kids standing on one leg and holding the book with one hand while using the other hand to put on a sock. Seriously. The parents sending these photos also suggest that this is not typical behavior for their children, so it isn’t just that we happen to know a bunch of people with weird kids.
M: And then there was the boy who showed up to our talk at the Texas Book Festival dressed like Milton.
R: that was the absolute best!
M: My favorite story is from a mom of a family who was vacationing in Orlando who wrote and said that she literally had to yell at her daughter to “Put down that book so that we can go to Disney World.”
R: That is literally my favorite compliment of all time.
M: I would like to dwell on this item forever, but maybe should we do the next thing?
7) IT HAS A VOCABULARY FOCUS
R: Hm. Don’t all books have “a vocabulary focus”? That sounds like marketing speak.
M: I guess it’s librarian speak. It’s from one of the reviews. But all it means is that Moxie loves words, even ones she doesn’t quite know the meaning of.
R: Kind of like you.
M: Yes. Also, Moxie can’t spell her way out of a paper bag.
R: Kind of like you.
M: Yes. THE POINT IS, kids will encounter a lot of great words in this book. There’s a glossary in the back, with some of my favorite words from the book, as defined by Moxie herself. But the book’s website has an online dictionary with many more words.
R: Whenever a kid sends a word to us, Moxie defines it, and we add it to the dictionary.
M: I am very excited about this. I hope they keep doing it.
R: Yes, please send Matthew some vocabulary words for Moxie to define so that I don’t have to deal with his crushing disappointment (it usually involves baking him a carrot cake, and I seriously don’t have time for that).
M: The book’s website, in case you’re wondering, is www.realmccoysbook.com.
R: I see what you did there.
8) THIS BOOK HAS A COMPANION SERIES
R: It has a companion series!
M: Yes! While I was writing The Real McCoys, I came up with the Annabelle Adams, Girl Detective series. Annabelle is Moxie’s hero and role model. She is a 12-year old James Bond-esque super detective, with adventures that are loopy and weird and unexpected. There are 58 books in the Annabelle Adams Series, and Moxie has read them all 37 and ½ times.
R: I love the titles. “Not Chinatown, Actual China.” And “The Really Bad Breakfast.” And, my personal favorite, “John Hancockamaimie.”
M: So anyway, one day while chuckling over something I had written about Annabelle, Robbi shouted across the room that I should just write an Annabelle Adams book and see what happened.
R: What happened is that he sat down and wrote the whole book in about two weeks.
M: This is true. It was so much fun.
R: It might be my favorite thing he’s ever written. It’s so weird.
M: I love it, too. And so over the past year, we’ve published it chapter-by-chapter on The Real McCoys website. Which, in case you missed it before, is www.realmccoysbook.com.
R: I see what you did a second time.
9) SO FAR, THIS SERIES HAS EARNED FOUR STARRED REVIEWS
R: This is very exciting to us but sounds kind of braggy.
M: I think we should talk about it just a little. It’s kind of a big deal.
R: We will discuss it clinically, just stating the facts! No brags! We keep trying to teach this lesson to our kids, so if it comes off braggy, please let them know so they can give the lecture back to us.
M: Ok, so here’s the facts: reviewers at Booklist, Publisher’s Weekly, and School Library Journal gave starred reviews to book 1. And School Library Journal just gave another star to book 2. Both books are Junior Library Guild selection. That is all.
10) MORE MOXIE IS ON THE WAY
M: Yes, I’m excited to say that we are currently putting the finishing touches on the third book in the series. It’s called Wonder Undercover.
R: Matthew put his finishing touches on the words for book three about a year ago. Right now I'm scrambling to meet my next deadline for the final art.
M: In Book 3, Moxie has to go undercover to infiltrate the insidious Wonder Scouts in order to help her sworn enemy investigate the dastardly doings of her other sworn enemy. It’s delicious.
R: I love the story. There are a few wonderful screaming muffin and werewolf pizza moments that remind me why I love to work with Matthew.
M: And I love what Robbi is doing with the illustrations. She’s found a new gear.
R: Unfortunately, my new gear takes longer than the old gear did. Once again, I am getting not much sleep these days.
M: I have stocked the pantry with plenty of fortifying snacks.
R: Key factors to my success.
M: Alright, well that was ten reasons.
R: We did it! Although I think we had to dig pretty deep with the Shiny Delight.
M: I think it’s pretty clear the shiny delight was part of your agenda from the very beginning. As was talking about how kids refused to stop reading the book while eating breakfast or putting on their socks. I think that was kind of braggy.
R: Come on, those were stone cold facts.
M: Once again, we are going off the rails. It’s time to wrap this up.
R: Alright. Thank you, everyone, for listening to our ten things, including the two that we have established were maybe kind of braggy.
M: If you want to know more about us, follow us on Facebook or Instagram where we post a new 60-second video every single day.
R: Do not come looking for insight.
M: We are utterly bereft of insight.
R: I can promise they are almost never braggy.
M: You can also check out our site, or our shop to browse our wares or hire us to speak at your boat christening.
R: We have never spoken at a boat christening.
M: But we absolutely would.
How to Make a Children’s Book
Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr here, the husband/wife, author/illustrator team behind Babies Ruin Everything, a soon-to-be-released picture book about an unsuspecting little girl whose blissful existence is suddenly upended by the arrival of a horrible, ruinous lump of a baby brother.
The book comes out on July 19, but it’s been in the works for a long, long time.
Here’s the story.
Way back in 2003, Robbi and I made our first book together. Kind of accidentally. She needed some words to illustrate for her grad school application, and so I showed her some of my strange little stories.
Robbi illustrated my words. A book emerged. We had so much fun.
And so we decided that making books together was the thing we wanted to do one day. When we grew up.
We spent about ten years working in various communications-related fields. Along the way, Robbi got her MFA.
One day we woke up and realized that, instead of making books together, we were spending all of our best energy making stuff for other people. This made us sad.
And so we quit our jobs and started making and publishing books for ourselves, and sending them out to anyone who seemed to be interested.
One of our early efforts was Babies Ruin Everything, a satirical book for adults about an older sibling’s frustrations upon the arrival of the new baby. It doubled as a birth announcement for our first son.
In a roundabout way, the book ended up in the hands of an editor named Erin. She liked it and thought might make an excellent children’s book for the commercial market — with major revisions and entirely new illustrations, of course.
Since the original version was written as a satirical piece for adults, some of the material wasn’t exactly children’s book fare. (The blood-sucking, baby eating spiders, for example.) So Erin and I set to work on revising the manuscript, to see if we could cobble together something she could pitch to her acquisitions team.
Meanwhile, Robbi sketched and painted and developed the characters.
A spunky little girl…
…her menace of a baby brother…
…and the girl’s trusty sidekick, best friend, and totem animal, Leonard the hamster.
Robbi also created one full scene—just to give Erin a sense of how the characters might look when placed in a full-color layout.
Months passed. Then a year. (Things happen not terribly quickly in the trade publishing world.). One day, we got a call from our fantastic agent, Meredith Kaffel Simonoff.
Erin had made an offer on Babies Ruin Everything! In fact, it was to be the very first picture book published by her brand-new imprint at Macmillan.
We did a lot of leaping and hollering. This was the “big break” one dreams of, and we had been dreaming of it for a long, long time. We spent a few minutes pinching ourselves…
…but then it was time to get to work.
There was more revising to do, and so I did it.
But most of the remaining work was Robbi’s, so she rolled up her sleeves and got down to business.
Her first job was refining the characters, in particular the protagonist. One of the great things that happens when you illustrate a book with a publishing company instead of with your husband in your living room is that you have access to people who actually know what they are doing. Harnessing her vast experience making children’s books, Erin suggested Robbi explore what might happen if the girl’s eyes were simplified from the version in our pitch.
To remind you, here are those original sketches.
Erin wondered if Robbi might model the eyes of our Babies Ruin Everything protagonist after those of the main character in our independently published children’s book My Henderson Robot. Here’s how that little girl’s eyes looked.
And here’s what Robbi came up with for the new version of Babies Ruin Everything heroine.
Simpler, sweeter, more expressive. More Robbi. We loved it. Once our protagonist was in hand, Robbi did more studies of the awful baby brother.
And trusty sidekick Leonard.
The next step was seeing what these characters would actually be doing as they made their way through the story. Instead of starting at the beginning and figuring the book out one page at a time, Robbi sketched out the entire thing by creating thumbnails, which are tiny versions of each page. This is the illustrator’s version of creating an outline before sitting down to write a paper.
The thumbnails allowed Erin to get a sense of the visual pacing of the book and to determine whether there was a good balance of fully developed scenes and simple illustrated spots. There was a bit of back and forth at this stage, but once Erin and Robbi were both happy, Robbi started creating more fully fleshed out sketches on her computer—still not final art, but a clearer sense of how the actual pages and spreads would look.
Here are a few examples.
The girl’s bedroom.
The baby being hoisted over Mom’s shoulder.
Girl and baby scribbling not very carefully in the corner.
Once the entire book was sketched out like this, Erin took another close look and made a few more suggestions for refinements. And then Robbi took the huge next step of developing the final artwork.
First, she took out her pen and ink and brushes and drew and created all the line work for the characters, using her light table so that she could use her sketches as a guide.
Once the lines were inked, Robbi paused briefly to admire her handiwork. Admiring is an often overlooked, but utterly indispensable, moment in the creation of any book.
Then it was time for the watercolor painting.
Painting, from what I can gather, is immensely gratifying.
It’s the moment when the characters escape from one flat, monochromatic plane of being.
And leap suddenly into another.
Suddenly, they are utterly alive and unleashed, for better or for worse.
When the painting was done, Robbi used her computer to place the inked and painted characters in the layout and built fully rendered scenes around them, using cutouts of sampled of watercolor washes like pieces of collage, adding shadows to create texture and depth. It’s a long and technically complicated process, but the end results are pretty satisfying.
Here’s what the three scenes I showed you in sketch form look like once transformed into finals.
Apples and oranges. Day and night. It is so fun to be a writer and watch firsthand as your manuscript gets transformed into something so much better.
Once the insides of the book were done, we all (Erin, Robbi, and I) leaped together into the tricky and essential process of creating the perfect cover.
Luckily, we were aided by the book’s designer, the excellent Liz Casal. But no matter the talents of those at the table, the process of testing and exploring and lamenting and weeping and finally rejoicing on the way to finding the perfect cover is a long one. But a hugely important one. As it turns out, the book-buying public really does judge a book by its cover, which is why there are people who specialize in knowing what works and what does not. Fortunately, the team at Macmillan really knows what they are doing.
We are over the moon about this cover. We love everything about it, from the general concept to the helpless and offended look on Leonard’s face to our wonky handwritten names.
Long before we got a chance to see and hold the actual printed book, we got a sneak peek of how the cover would look and feel. To make sure that authors and illustrators are kept in the loop, editors send them copies of the press sheets.
Press sheets show the actual artwork printed on the actual paper stock with the actual finishing techniques. In the case of our cover, all that delicious red ink is covered with a glossy varnish, which is laid down in a subsequent run through the press after all of the images are in place. The varnish creates a delightful gleam, a texture that you can deliciously appreciate by running your finger across the page. Which means the baby’s scribbles literally rise up from the rest of the page.
As long-time independent publishers, we got seriously geeked out. Not only is the quality of printing head and tails above anything we can manage in-house, but such techniques as varnishing are just beyond our scope. Another first for us with this book: the dust jacket. Here it is in full, stretched-out glory. The front flap (on the right) introduces the characters and teases the story. The back flap (on the left) has our bios and author’s photo — or author’s illustration, as the case may be.
But that was just the cover. The interiors were equally stunning. The kids joined us in perusing the proofs. They had been hearing about Babies Ruin Everything for so long and were excited to finally have a look.
Apparently, they like it. All except the one on the right, who (as the closest thing we have to a baby in this family) was insistent on living up to his role and ruining the shot.
I want to take a moment to give a shout out to the core of our Babies Ruin Everything team. Although so many others have contributed to this book’s long gestation (thanks to Jesse Post, Nicole Otto, Patti Ann Harris, Mary Kate Gaudet, Liz Casal, and Bridget Watson Payne among others), we want to give particular thanks to our incredible agent Meredith Kaffel Simonoff (red dress), whose smarts and savvy and expert stewardship helped make this project a reality, and to our visionary editor Erin Stein (far right), she who took the leap of faith to give us this opportunity and feeds us donuts and makes our ideas so much better.
We have always loved the Flatiron Building, long before we had any idea that it housed the Macmillian offices and long before we knew that we and Macmillan would one day be in such cahoots. But these days, we feel even more attached to the place, and so grateful to have a creative home there, in the eighth floor conference room—where tiny seeds of ideas grow into full-grown books and reckless dreams become reality.
Thanks for taking a few minutes to relive this journey with us. We would love nothing more than to share our book with you. It comes out on July 19, but you can order it now.
Babies Ruin Everything is the trade picture book debut from Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr. Be on the lookout for their next picture book, Everywhere, Wonder (February 2017) and the first installment of their middle grades series The Real McCoys, coming Fall 2017. Learn more about the rest of their nonsense here.