Today I stopped by Barnes & Noble to see if they had any Easter board books for Eli. The one I wanted to get had the following requirements:
- decent illustrations that weren’t the typical Christian-y ones from the 1970’s
- creative text about the actual Bible story
- everyone in it couldn’t be Caucasian, and especially I wanted Jesus to be brown-skinned (like he was in real life)
It turns out that this book doesn’t exist. I found one in which Jesus had brown skin but the text was terrible. Then I found one with decent text but Jesus was pretty much straight out of Godspell. And then I found this one.
Cute illustrations and decent text but it’s about polar bears! How much whiter can you get?
Last week I found these Les Petits Fairytales books and Eli loves them. We read them all the time now in between readings of Little Blue Truck and Red Truck.
Okay, so Snow White and Cinderella are Caucasian. And I’m pretty sure it’s the same Prince in both books, so Snow White and Cinderella may want to get together and talk about that. But these books are fabulous. The illustrations are fun and interesting; the text is a simple one word on each page, allowing for the reader to add as much detail as s/he wants; and these are classic stories that everyone knows, told in a new way. (We’ll be getting the next four in the series when they come out in May: Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast.)
It’s the same with these books:
And these:
Classic stories, one or two words per page, innovative illustrations: why doesn’t something like this exist for Bible stories? Just standing in front of the Christian section of kids’ books is frankly sort of sad. There is nothing new or inviting about any of them. The only ones that look vaguely interesting to me are Old Testament stories (David & Goliath, Noah’s Ark), and a large portion of those look dated and frankly sort of lame.
So I’m calling it now. Anybody who is a graphic designer, artist or illustrator (and I know I have quite a few friends who are!), please help me with this. I’ll do the text and the concepts and you get to do the really fun part. Obviously it’ll probably never actually see the light of day and we certainly won’t make any money or anything but I truly think this ought to happen. Right? Who’s in?
I understand that there wasn’t much writing in this post, but I figured having an idea about writing, and then writing about that idea, counted. Besides, it’s late and I am sleepy.