Crockett Johnson: The Art of Imagination
Small stories, big questions
“Can you tell me a story?” My 7-year-old son asked while slurping a big spoonful of marshmallows from his bowl of cereal. It was early; the sky was still dark as night. My husband and daughter were cozy asleep in their beds, and my coffee had yet to kick in. I was not in prime storytelling shape. “How about we tell one together?” I suggested, knowing he’d eagerly take over, allowing me more sleepy-zombie-mommy-coffee-time. “What should the story be about?” he asked. I looked at a note I had scribbled on a nearby notepad. “How about a skeleton’s garden?” I asked. And that was it; he jumped right in without hesitation. He knew that this was a fairy tale about an old farmer who loved to plant cabbages. His cabbages were the best in the land. Then, one night, someone—a witch—had snuck into his garden and put a spell on his special cabbages, a poisonous spell. So when the farmer woke the next day and took a bite of his beloved cabbage, he immediately keeled over and died, leaving the cabbages all to the wicked witch. But a year later, buried deep down in the garden soil, among worms and bugs and eerie things, laid the skeleton of the restless, vengeful farmer who was determined to catch the witch and take back his garden.
Hearing this story, I no longer felt drowsy; I was rapt. This kid knows how to tell a story, I thought. But because he’s 7 and not me—an adult obsessed with a good story—he got distracted by the lack of marshmallows left in his bowl and moved on. I, on the other hand, have been obsessively wondering how the story ends. Of course, I could come up with my own fairy tale ending, but I’d rather know his. Did the skeleton catch the witch? Surely. But if my son were telling it, this story would have delightfully gone off the rails somehow, like the introduction of an alien spaceship crashing into the farmer’s garden. Then, the aliens abduct the witch and ship her to Mars, where she’s held prisoner and forced to eat dry cereal without any marshmallows for eternity. The End.
The story wasn’t the only thing that got me thinking; it was how my son immediately and confidently knew what it was about. I was envious of how he could dive in and out of his imagination without skipping a beat. I thought of a quote I’d read by the famous children’s book author-illustrator Maurice Sendak:
“Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.” 1
It also reminded me of one of my favorite children’s books, Ellen’s Lion, by Sendak’s mentor and close friend, Crockett Johnson. It’s a series of 12 short stories about Ellen, a spirited young girl who uses her robust imagination to engage in skits, stories, songs, and, sometimes, Socratic dialogue with her best friend, a stuffed lion. Like my son, Ellen effortlessly transitions between fantasy and reality. Her imagination has gaps where reality slips in and out; there are conflicts in the details. Imaginative play is full of inconsistencies. The fantastical and mundane swirl together, like in a dream. Reading stories that feel like dreams can be stressful, but not with Johnson; he keeps the stories tight: they’re funny and warm and almost always end on a perfectly abrupt note.
Ellen’s Lion, published in 1959, is like Johnson’s other books for children: perceptive and precise, with dry, laconic humor, full of imaginative possibilities, but at the same time, its format is unlike his other books, or really any other children’s book. It’s not a picture book, chapter book, early reader, graphic novel, or even a collection of short stories—at least not in the way we think of them for adults. It’s more like a play or a newspaper comic strip; the conversations are broken into philosophical and comedic moments but without the tight constraints of tiny panels and speech bubbles. Still, the stories are short, only a few pages long, each with one or two illustrations. There’s no traditional plot, and each story can hold its own, but the pleasure of reading this book comes from getting to know these characters and anticipating how they might respond in various situations. And you can only do that if you read all of the stories.
It’s a little like reading a collected anthology of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. Actually, the premise is a lot like Calvin and Hobbes (1985-1995). Both are about a precocious young child who creatively imagines their favorite stuffed animal into being, and both are humorous and insightful with sophisticated language and a complex narrative conceit. Now that I think about it, it’s unsurprising that Ellen’s Lion feels like a comic strip, even though it doesn’t resemble one. Before children’s books, Johnson was a successful cartoonist. In the 1930s, he drew comics for the political publication New Masses and, later, Collier’s. His first commercial success came in 1942 with his daily comic strip Barnaby. While not an immediate smash hit, it developed a cult following over its 10-year run, with a devoted fan club that included Dorothy Parker, Duke Ellington, and Charles Schulz. Parker wrote that Barnaby was "the most important addition to American arts and letters in Lord knows how many years." And the American painter Rockwell Kent wrote, “I yield to no one in my ‘blathering admiration’ of Barnaby.” Chris Ware, one of the most uniquely talented comic artists working today, wrote in his introduction to Barnaby, Volume One (2013), “I never thought I'd see this day, but the book you hold is, well… the last great comic strip. Yes, there are dozens of other strips worth rereading, but none are this Great; this is great like Beethoven, or Steinbeck, or Picasso. This is so great it lives in its own timeless bubble of oddness and truth…"
Barnaby was truly one-of-a-kind, with clever, sophisticated humor that not only spoke to the well-educated but to a mass audience, including children. It’s also the only strip to regularly feature typeset dialogue. Instead of hand-lettering, Johnson used Futura Medium Italic, a modern font choice, especially for the early ‘40s. He also drew the speech bubbles first and then pasted the written portion into them, which takes incredible planning and precision. This typographic style would become Johnson’s trademark.
The strip features Barnaby Baxter, a bright young boy who, one night, after reading a fairy tale with his mother, is visited by his fairy godfather, Mr. O’Malley, through his bedroom window. But unlike the fanciful fairy godmothers we’re familiar with, Mr. O’Malley is a short, portly man in a trench coat and hat with pink wings and a cigar for a magic wand. He’s fabulously fallible—a real buffoon—with bumbling magical abilities and a penchant for gambling, and yet, despite his quirks, or perhaps because of them, Mr. O’Malley is remarkably loveable, especially to Barnaby, who never loses faith in his flawed fairy godfather. But Barnaby’s parents never believe in Mr. O’Malley, no matter how hard Barnaby tries to convince them. The humorous tension between the two conflicting realities (Barnaby’s and his parents’) is at the heart of the strip. Barnaby’s fantastical world is absurd to the adults, but to him, it’s the adult world that’s bewildering. Even we, as readers, become convinced that Mr. O’Malley could be real (he’s elected to Congress!), but his realness is not entirely unequivocal. Barnaby’s imagination is rooted in the reality of everyday life, and the balance between the two is fragile.
In Barnaby, Volume One—the first published collection of the original strips—the author and cultural critic Jeet Heer wrote:
“In the world of Barnaby there is a constant tension between the narrow-minded philosophy that only believes what it sees and the equally dangerous tendency of letting belief guide sight. The first philosophy leads to a soul-crushing empiricism that denies the imagination any freedom, while the second philosophy leads to flights of unreality (of the type that Mr. O’Malley specializes in). Barnaby has to walk a tightrope between these two philosophies, making sure that he balances his imagination with his sense of reality.”
While working on Barnaby, Johnson began illustrating children’s books. His first, The Carrot Seed (1945), was written by his wife, fellow acclaimed children’s author Ruth Krauss, who famously collaborated with Sendak on A Hole is to Dig (1952) and many other revolutionary children’s books of the ‘50s. Krauss and Johnson didn’t have children of their own, but they shared a keen understanding of what it means to be a child, and they were fascinated with the child’s imagination. This time, it’s not the belief in an absurd fairy godfather but in a carrot seed. A little boy believes his seed will grow into a carrot despite the doubts of his naysaying parents and older brother. But his belief is steadfast, and with time and attention, his seed turns into a colossal-sized carrot.