Postmodern Picture Books

Study Task 1 – Postmodern picture books – Blog A

I have selected two postmodern picture books that are unique in the way they show postmodern strategies.

The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan.
Magpies, Volume 15, Issue No. 4, September 2000, ‘Picture Books for Older Readers’, p.31.

Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing is written from a child’s perspective and is reminiscent of a boy’s carefully constructed scrapbook. The plot is simplistic, a young boy living in a treeless retro city of the future, finds a lost surreal looking red thing, takes it home, is told he cannot keep it and eventually finds a new home for it. Paradoxically it is a sophisticated work that contains multi-layered visual and verbal text that will challenge the adult reader’s social conscience.

Apart from one page that is totally blank, the pages are totally covered, there are no white areas, and all the pages consist of a collage of scientific and technical blueprints. Layered onto these images are verbal texts that have been neatly handwritten onto blue lined paper, cut out and then glued in place.

The double page featured in the middle of book is in direct contrast to the collage of the other horizontal pages and is viewed by turning the book 90 degrees. The outside of the page is black; the viewer is looking through a framed doorway at surrealist creatures playing in a carefree manner.

Tan acknowledges that he has appropriated Australian artists Jeffrey Smart and John Brack’s paintings ‘Cahill’s Expressway’ and ‘Collins Street’ for this picture book. Pete, the narrator’s friend appears to be wearing a ‘Mambo’ shirt and uses ‘Mambo’ style language.


Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Book? By Lauren Child.
Magpies, Volume 17, Issue No. 5, November 2002, ‘A Close Look At’ by Lyn Linning, pp.4, 5.

Childs has used features within metafiction to self-consciously inform the reader/s of the artifice of this picture book. Herb is the very conspicuous narrator, who falls asleep reading a book of fairy tales. He awakes to find Goldilocks shrieking at him ‘to leave her page!’ Herb realises that he has fallen into his fairytale book, and as he races from story to story trying to escape from the book he meets a pastiche of characters from The Three Bears, Rapunzel, Puss in Boots and Cinderella. Herb finally escapes by climbing up the text falling out of the book onto his bedroom floor.

Sophisticated jokes abound in this postmodern picture book: for example- The title Who’s Afraid of The Big Bad Book? is a pun on Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?, and when the medium sized bear offers Herb some porridge the text states-
‘You might find it too hot or too cold.
I’m afraid we’re out of just right’.

Featured throughout this overt picture book is an eclectic use of mixed media images including photos, ink drawings, collage work, macro and micro views. Conventional, gothic and eccentric textual fonts all work in unison with the verbal text and mixed media images to provide an ironic, playful postmodern parody.

Robyn Mundt:)

References:
Stephens, J & Watson, K &Parker, J (eds), 2003, From Picture Book to Literary Theory, St. Claire Press, Sydney.
Tan, S The Lost Thing, viewed 9 April 2007, <>.