Jason Sandberg's Blog: Kingdom Comeuppance, page 4

99 Cents Number 1

Picture books ought to be a gateway to a lifelong love of reading, so they should never be a drag for kids, or the adults who act as intermediaries between the child and the book. I view quality as the ability of a book to hold up under multiple reads!

“You can’t judge a book by its cover,” so I have published 99 Cents, an inexpensive eBook that gives parents the opportunity to sample my illustrations and see that I'm attempting to create work that will survive the test of time.

"99 Cents" features the exclusive short story “Walking on Daddy’s Feet,” a celebration of a playful tradition. Gina @ Satisfaction for Insatiable Readers described it best... "Here, father and daughter share time in the sun and the snow, at the beach and at home, through the city and through the neighborhood, as they create memories that'll last their whole lives through. It shows how sharing the simplest of things can be priceless and that the best of times can be had when spent with someone we love."
99 Cents is available at Amazon

Captain Kleinbottle 5

Captain Kleinbottle 4

Captain Kleinbottle 3

Captain Kleinbottle 2

Captain Kleinbottle 1

1990s Crawdaddy

This month I dug into my Archives and posted an indy comic strip
from the 1990s. Here comes Crawdaddy!

The Synesthesia trip of “Night Driving”

The world is small when you’re a six year old. Life is a simple and reassuring pattern. The memories that shine the brightest are those times when your parents pluck you out of your daily routine, when you get to stay up past your bedtime, when you see pieces of the world beyond your neighborhood, when you realize the towering adults were once kids too. The world becomes bigger.
John Coy’s Night Driving captures that feeling of discovery in his boyhood story of an evening road trip with his father. They leave home in the afternoon and drive west to go camping in the mountains. John is surprised that they’ll be driving all night, and that he won’t have to go to sleep at bedtime. His father stops the car and draws John’s attention to the deer along the side of the road. “Many animals come out at night,” Dad says. “Keep your eyes open.” John notes that the deer are able to leap over fences, and perhaps in front of cars? Vigilance is a virtue.

The drive through the night continues, over bridges and under stars, providing the opportunity for John to hear stories about his father’s childhood. “As he looks ahead, my dad tells stories about when he was a boy. I look at his face and imagine what he was like.” History, filled with sports legends and past presidents, is another new world to explore. A flat tire interrupts the drive, but provides young John with the opportunity to help his dad. Holding a flashlight while his dad mounts the spare tire, John shines light upon the grown up world where problems are solved, broken things are fixed.

“Stopping for breakfast,” Dad says, “is my favorite part of driving at night.” They stop at a roadside diner where a wisecracking waitress serves them pancakes. When father and son exit the diner the rising sun illuminates a jagged horizon. They’ve reached the mountains.

The story in “Night Driving” is well served by the art of Peter McCarty. McCarty works in pencil, but eschews line in favor of value and volume. “Most of the detail is captured in pencil, to try to bring life into the drawing,” McCarty said in a 2006 interview with Publisher’s Weekly. “It takes a long time to build up that black — you can’t just take a big black crayon and go over it once. There are so many variations of gray—my hand gets exhausted from filling it up.” Those who only casually glance at McCarty’s illustrations are cheating themselves. Rich details hide beneath the soft focus. Your eyes struggle just a bit to discern what is on the horizon. This optical sensation underscores the subplot of drowsiness in John Coy’s nocturnal journey.

“Night Driving” is a synesthesia trip, you can hear the summer night when you look at the pages.

Baby Julia Feeds the Moon

Since the age of five my daughter has periodically become involved with my artwork. It began one afternoon during lunch. She pointed at a still life on the wall and said, “Seriously, Daddy, how did you squish an apple into that painting?” It was too cute! All children go through their crayon and marker phase, but it usually passes away. I invited her to paint with me and I set aside a canvas for us to work on together during rainy days. The process was as delightful as the results, a family tradition was born. We have collaborated every year since 2008. Picasso said, “Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.”



Recently my daughter was the inspiration for the cute heroine in my newest book. The seed for the story was planted in 2004. We were sitting in her rocking chair before bedtime, I was holding her in my arms and she kept standing up to peer out the window. Her insistence made me chuckle because there was nothing for her infant eyes to see in our back yard. It was one of those tiny moments you hold onto as the rest of your daily life is blurring past you.



I wanted to capture the innocent curiosity of my baby Julia looking out the window at the night sky. I drew the picture that adorns the cover first, and then asked myself “What would she see? What would she hear outside the window?” I won’t spoil the rest of the adventure, but I promise that I crafted Baby Julia Feeds the Moon to be an ideal bedtime story with soft colors, mood lighting, and some funny moments.

As for the real Julia, she’s not a baby anymore...

An Appreciation of Istvan Banyai’s “Zoom”

You see an orange comb crowning a rooster in a farmyard. As your field of vision widens you realize that this farmyard is a tabletop toy being assembled by a young girl. Your field of vision expands, revealing that the scene of the girl and farmyard is actually in a magazine being read by a drowsy boy. Your vantage point moves backward, you see the boy is lounging next to a pool on the deck of a cruise ship. Your eye zooms backward, showing you that the cruise ship is actually an advertisement on the side of a bus in metropolitan traffic. Zoom, you discover the bus is a scene in a television show being watched by a man in the Arizona desert. Zoom

The reader of Istvan Banyai’s “Zoom” is initially lulled into believing that each page illustrates a simple decreasing of the magnification of the original image. The magic happens when further zooming outward forces the mind to formulate a new gestalt, which is subsequently overturned and replaced. Perhaps Banyai is tickling the mind via repeated paradigm shifts! Each lyrically illustrated world in “Zoom” is a matryoshka doll nested within the world we discover a few pages later. Each of these nested worlds is brought to life by a draftsmanship that evokes a delightful fusion of Egon Schiele and Jean Giraud.

Banyai was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1949. He defied the authoritarian backdrop of his formative years by cultivating an artistic style that was “an organic combination of turn-of-the-century Viennese Retro, interjected with American pop, some European absurdity added for flavor, served on a cartoon-style color palette.” In the 1980s Banyai immigrated to the United States, flourishing as a magazine illustrator. “Zoom” received widespread critical acclaim when it was published in 1995. Visit Istvan Banyai's website here.

“Zoom” holds a special place in my heart. I’m principally a painter. Paintings are frozen moments that evoke a mood or idea. Narrative in painting is ethereal, being either implied by the artist or inferred by the viewer. The virtue of the indecisive nature of narrative in painting is that it allows for long periods of contemplation. The underlying aesthetic experience is enriched by the ability of the viewer to write a story when gazing at a painting. Several years ago I’d become restless. I also wanted to construct decisive narratives with a beginning, middle and end. Painting was no longer enough. About that time I came across “Zoom.” It gave me a jolt because I saw that Picture Books could be another way to combine storytelling with quality illustration. Picture Books could truly be for All Ages.

“Zoom” helped me see the world differently.