There’s a new picture-book version of “Hansel and Gretel,” written by the novelist Stephen King, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak, the great children’s author and illustrator. Sendak died in 2012; the book uses his designs for a 1997 staging of Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera. Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen, who make picture books together and write a newsletter about the art form, discussed the book via text message.
MAC: So, in picture books, usually the words come first. This is especially true when the book is written and illustrated by two different people. Jon, you’ve illustrated several books written by someone else. When you take on a manuscript, what is “the job”?
JON: I’d say the illustrator is in the business of reacting to the text, doing work the manuscript doesn’t do. This can mean providing new information, adding a different tone or even subverting the words a little.
MAC: It’s this fluid, playful dynamic between text and image that animates the art form. As Sendak himself put it, the picture book is “an ingenious juxtaposition of picture and word, a counterpoint. … Words are left out — but the picture says it. Pictures are left out — but the word says it.” And when the words come first, it largely falls on the illustrator to create those “ingenious juxtapositions.”
But, Jon, let’s say, hypothetically, that you died.
JON: Sure.
MAC: And, in this hypothetical, I am still alive. And I have a rock-solid alibi.
JON: Sure.
MAC: If a publisher gave me a set of your drawings and asked me to make a picture book, our usual roles would be reversed. Your art would establish the narrative framework, and I would try to use my words to support and extend the story. Seems difficult.
JON: I’d be nervous about it! Even in death.
MAC: Your spirit hovering over my shoulder, looking at my laptop, wincing.
JON: Shaking my ghost-head at all of your choices.
MAC: Sounds like a Stephen King novel!
JON: For this “Hansel and Gretel,” King was working with Sendak’s production drawings for an opera.
MAC: And in some of the best moments of this book, we feel like we’re at the theater. The second spread, for example, is dominated by an empty set: a large illustration of Hansel and Gretel’s home. The text, set in a white bar on the right, is accented with spot illustrations of the children’s father and stepmother.
JON: This is maybe my favorite spread in the whole thing. It’s so different and inviting to have a drawing of an empty room, and then little guys off to the side. Your job as the viewer is to then puppet those actors around the stage.
MAC: And the “puppets” sit next to descriptions of the characters, so the words imbue the pictures with life and meaning. The drawing of the stepmother is pretty neutral. She’s sitting with her hands folded, eyes lowered. This makes sense — it’s production art, and Sendak’s focus is her costume. But when you read the accompanying paragraph, in which she suggests to her husband that they leave his children in the woods, the picture is changed: Now it’s a portrait of a cunning plotter.
JON: Yeah! The text is doing what it does best here, or what it does better than the pictures — showing action and character nuance.
MAC: As an art form, the picture book is deeply connected to the theater. Picture books are “performed” — the adult reading aloud is an actor who plays every part. The turning of a page mimics the rising of a curtain, revealing a new scene. And so this repurposed drawing of a set, Hansel and Gretel’s home, feels absolutely natural.
Not all of Sendak’s stage designs are deployed so elegantly. On five spreads, big blocks of text sit under a proscenium of trees, without any characters on the page.
JON: Sendak seems to have been super excited about tree prosceniums.
MAC: I have to say, I would get pretty sweaty if I had to read a long passage to a kid who only has a tree proscenium to look at. Five times.
JON: Look, Mac, kids aren’t a monolith. Don’t discount the tree proscenium kids.
MAC: On these spreads, the book really stops working like a picture book and becomes something less interesting. Sendak’s art is mere ornament, a decoration for a narrative that’s occurring only in prose. It feels like King had a story he wanted to tell but there was no art to match it, so it just got stuck under a tree proscenium. The book feels more exciting when Sendak’s art pushes the writing to places it might not have gone otherwise.
JON: Oh man, like the Witch Dream.
MAC: Yeah. The Witch Dream. So a tree proscenium spread describes Hansel and Gretel falling asleep the night before they’re taken to the woods: “Now these children had dreams. Gretel’s was peaceful, of angels circling the moon. Hansel, however, had a nightmare.” You’re primed now to turn the page and, when you do …
JON: Witch Dream.
MAC: On the verso, there’s a lovely full-bleed picture of angels flying around a tearful moon. We recognize this as Gretel’s dream.
On the recto, there’s a crone riding a broom. An economic bit of writing explains that this is Hansel’s nightmare: “He dreamed of a witch on a broomstick, flying through the clouds with a bag behind her filled with screaming kids.”
JON: It really is a great moment for both the words and the pictures.
MAC: King is combining pieces Sendak made for two different parts of Humperdinck’s opera: the Hexenritt, or Witch’s Ride, an interlude after Act 1, and the Traumpantomime, or Dream Pantomime, at the end of Act 2. The illustrations have inspired King to write a completely new scene. The good old picture book give and take!
JON: It’s a cool confirmation that it can work the other way, sometimes. That the pictures can come first and the writing can react and add to them. It almost never gets to happen this way — and even if it does, the audience wouldn’t necessarily know what came first.
MAC: It’s nice when it works. But too often the words and pictures feel disconnected, like two different versions of “Hansel and Gretel” — King’s and Sendak’s — have accidentally been bound together in a single volume. Nowhere more so than in the last picture we get of Hansel and Gretel, which comes after the kids have killed the witch (here named Rhea) and are headed home through the woods. First of all, this is one of the most beautiful Sendak pictures I’ve ever seen.
JON: It’s … bananas.
MAC: Hansel and Gretel recline, eyes closed, on the forest floor, while animals bring them a feast. There’s fresh fruit and vegetables, and fish, and a basket of eggs. A fox is offering a tray with a huge — what is that, Jon? A Yorkshire pudding?
JON: We will never know for sure, but it looks delicious.
MAC: Well one reason we will never know is that the text doesn’t acknowledge this illustration in any way! This is one of Sendak’s few narrative illustrations, a picture that shows something happening. And it’s a hugely significant, hugely cathartic moment. In a story about hunger, Hansel and Gretel are nourished by the same woods that nearly killed them.
But the only mention the text makes of animals is this: “If wolves or bears saw them or smelled them, they let the children alone, for the animals of the forest had also hated and feared Rhea.” It’s jarring and dissonant. Not only did the animals not leave the kids alone, they fed them! I am stressed out by this! JON, ARE YOU STRESSED??
JON: I’ve been looking some more and I think it is a Yorkshire pudding.
MAC: It has to be, right? I guess it could be a giant caramel corn.
JON: I do like how seriously everyone seems to have taken this project. Sendak was a serious guy, and everyone took that cue, tonally. It feels reverent. It’s full of tricky problems to solve, but there is a grandeur to it.
MAC: Tricky problems, indeed. Jon?
JON: Yes, Mac.
MAC: If you do die …
JON: Uh huh.
MAC: Please leave me a bunch of tree proscenium drawings.
JON: You bet.
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