The Cartoonist Liana Finck Picks Three Favorite Children’s Books

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

Liana Fink is a cartoonist who contributes to The New Yorker.

She's also the author of the graphic memoir Passing for Human and other books.

Her work has a quality of being somehow whimsical and at the same time, kind of profound.

And like many of her great forebearers at the magazine, she's also done children's books.

Earlier this year, Liana published a book called Mixed Feelings that explores, well, just that, the ways that our emotions sometimes confuse us.

And that's something that happens if you're four or you're 64.

I asked Liana Fink to join me and talk about some of the illustrators who have inspired her over time.

Liana, you've been contributing amazing work, amazing cartoons to the magazine for a decade now, which seems hard to believe, and you've published children's books of your own.

What's the overlap between cartoons for adults and children's books, if any?

I think the children's book as we know it was kind of invented by an editor at Harper and Row named Ursula Nordstrom.

She published E.B.

White.

These books just kind of like get to the heart of things.

I would compare them to fairy tales.

Right.

Children's books are very often like fables.

I think we could say that that's the root of children's books is Aesop's fables or

things like that.

They had a moral lesson.

Is that still the case in books that you're reading with your kids?

Aaron Powell, more so.

Yeah, more.

I would say more lesson.

And we're a lot savvier about psychology now.

So in some ways, the books are a lot more sophisticated.

And in other ways, they're less weird.

And that's a little bit sad.

I think

maybe the first, Pat the Bunny and Good Night Moon is the book I think I've read most in my life.

Yeah,

it's perfect.

I think it's possible that I've read that thousands of times to various kids of mine.

How has Becoming a Mother changed your relationship to what you think makes a good kids' book?

It has brought me back to the root of like why I love art.

Kids' books were my first experience of art.

They're really why I do what I do.

I loved them.

I think I stopped loving them when it stopped being socially appropriate.

But like it's weird when you're a drawing person to stop looking at kids' books because that's the main like one of the real venues for people to draw stories and that's what I do.

It's really different from fine art and painting and sculpture and stuff.

So it's given me an excuse to get back to basics and I'm also watching my kid and watching what he likes.

And I'm realizing it's so much simpler than like what I try to do as an artist.

I'm like always trying to go for the real reach.

Well, walk us through your selections.

My understanding is that your first is by

William Stagg, who I even knew a little bit when I started as editor.

So tell me about the William Stogg book that you brought.

I think it's one of the first ones he published.

It's also kind of a deep cut.

I was really debating bringing Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, which is probably the first William Stagg book I would recommend, but I'm assuming you've all read it.

So I brought one called C D B that's kind of a little bit for kids and a little bit for grown-ups.

And it's a book written in kind of puzzles where each word is represented by a letter.

So he only says things that can be written just as letters.

So the

phrase C the B is written as the letters C, D,

and B.

And then he illustrates them with these kind of anarchic,

super emotional, super simple drawings that are not a reach.

Like, he always stayed true to like the most direct kind of drawing.

And I think that's why he made such a good kids' book author, which is something he became like long after he'd been making cartoons for decades.

So those came much later.

Yeah, he was in his late 50s, I think, when he started doing these storybooks.

And there's another puzzle in the book.

It's I Envy You, and it's spelled I, the letter N, dash the letter V, the letter U.

And it's a picture of a plaintive-looking boy talking to a much more confident, slightly older-looking boy who is eating a lollipop.

And one nice thing about this book and Steig's work in general is that he doesn't talk down to children.

He uses big words.

He talks about complex things.

So envy probably isn't a word you would normally see in a children's book.

And he's boiling it down to make it so, so simple and so like essential and to be something a child could absolutely relate to.

Aaron Powell,

Next up is another alphabet-based book, and this one is by...

Another artist that I adore and who's published quite a lot in the New Yorker, Myra Kalman.

Tell me about this book.

So this is called What Pete Ate from A to Z, and it's autobiographical in that it's about a dog named Pete who was Myra Kalman's dog.

I brought this book because I think Myra Kalman might be my favorite kids book author and illustrator.

And the first book that I read

when I was four, when I thought I really like this is my favorite thing in the world and I want to do this was another book by her called Sayonara Mrs.

Kackleman.

And I think it had come out that year.

It was new and it was, it's so punk rock, and it's so wild.

Now, you, you know or knew Myra Coleman.

You were an intern for her?

Yeah.

So I wrote both her and Roz Chast letters when I was like 16.

I think I wrote to Roz first, and

that began like the most meaningful correspondence in my life.

But I wrote to Myra a little bit later, and she let me come be her intern.

What does an intern for an artist do?

She had me organize her moss collection and walk feet.

I'm speaking with Liana Fink.

More in a moment.

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Taking Tylenol is

not good.

This week, Donald Trump claimed without evidence that autism is linked to acetamedaphin use during pregnancy.

We've done this research, and it's so frustrating that the people that are running these programs, they have no idea about the science.

As research budgets are slashed, brace for much more bad science to come.

On this week's On the Media from WNYC.

Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, here's one that's been around for a while.

Tell me Mitzi.

What do you love about it?

Tell me a Mitzi.

The motif in this book is that there's a little girl named Martha living in then modern times.

And she says to her parents, tell me a Mitzi.

And then they tell her a story about a little girl named Mitzi who's growing up, I want to say in the 40s or 50s.

And this is a collaboration between?

Lori Siegel wrote it and Harriet Pincus illustrated it.

Lori Siegel, everyone needs to know as a writer-writer.

She was a child of the Holocaust, born in Vienna, I think.

And Lori Siegel wrote for The New Yorker pretty frequently and died within the last year or so.

A year ago,

in October, yeah.

And here's a little bit from the first story in Tell Me of Mitzi that I really like.

The doorman helped Mitzi take the stroller down the steps and Mitzi pushed Jacob to the corner of the street and called, taxi.

A taxi stopped and the driver got out and came around to their side.

He lifted Jacob out of the stroller and put him in the back seat and lifted Mitzi in and folded up the stroller and put it in the empty front seat and walked around to his side and got in and said, Where to?

Grandma and Grandpa's house, please, said Mitzi.

Where do they live?

asked the driver.

I don't know, said Mitzi.

So the driver got out and came around to the other side and took the stroller from the front seat and unfolded it on the sidewalk and took Jacob out and put him in the stroller and took Mitzi out and put her on the sidewalk and walked around to his side and got in and drove away.

So on the first page the words are next to a full page image of Mitzi walking out of her building and she's pushing this this stroller and she's passing all these kids playing on the street and she's wearing this iconic um snowsuit with purple with orange stars on it that I remember so well from when I was a kid and everything's just so like a little cabbage batch doll ugly and also just so appealing and so delicious and I think Lori Siegel is really wise she was a mother and I think she knew that words are just like comforting to kids.

And she wrote, I think she intentionally made this story a little bit tedious.

There's a ton of tedious detail.

And I think it's really soothing for kids.

But

I still love these pictures a lot.

And as an adult, the things I love in these illustrations are the same things I loved as a kid.

And that's so interesting.

Like, I think when we look at pictures, it brings us back to exactly who we were when we were kids, which is magic.

Do you think cartoons, which began, you know, in satirical magazines and probably on cave walls, will last forever?

Or is it a form that's challenged by the winnowing of magazines and the

gigantic growth of the internet?

Aaron Powell,

it's going to last forever,

even if we're doing it secretly.

I think it goes so deep.

It's interesting, like people,

like in the inspirational moment that we were in recently, maybe still are, I don't know, people would be like, why should everyone draw?

Like that's a question I would get asked.

And I'd be like, not everyone should draw.

That's ridiculous.

Like everyone, like everyone's different.

I should draw.

But I'm kind of changing my mind.

I think it's like so essential.

I think it's very similar to music.

It's just like something that comes out of us.

Liana Fink, thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

Liana Fink's illustrated books include Mixed Feelings and Questions Without Answers.

You can find some of her cartoons at NewYorker.com and you can subscribe to The New Yorker there as well.

New Yorker.com.

I'm David Remnick and thanks for joining us today.

See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbis of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul.

This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer, with guidance from Emily Botine and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Parrish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Torina Endowment Fund.

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My name is Madeline Barron.

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