Q & A with Jon Agee

By Nathalie op de Beeck, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 6/12/2008

With his love of spoonerisms, anagrams and palindromes, Jon Agee might seem like the kind of guy who always did his homework as a child. But the hero of his new picture book, The Retired Kid (Hyperion, June), feels overwhelmed by childhood responsibilities and opts for a more restful life in Florida. Agee says the idea of an eight-year-old retiree has struck a common chord among his older and younger audiences.

Jon Agee.

That happened organically. I started noticing that in between each picture book there was a book of wordplay. It’s probably some sort of relief, where I go from focusing on a picture book story with a couple characters to the wordplay books with separate little cartoon images, where there’s no strong narrative to be tinkered with. It can sometimes take months to a year or more to hammer out a good story, and meanwhile an image for a palindrome or an anagram doesn’t take nearly that long. It’s a different kind of muscle that’s being used, and it has definitely worked out to be a pleasant counterpoint to working on one narrative. After this book [The Retired Kid], there’s going to be a book of tongue-twister poems.

Was there a particular event that led you to create The Retired Kid? 

I visit a lot of schools, and one day I noticed a bunch of kids getting off a school bus. They were all loaded down with backpacks and suitcases—some had a backpack and a suitcase—and some had trumpet cases under one arm and an art project under the other. It looked like they were on a mountaineering expedition! I thought, they’re going in to school, it’s eight in the morning, they do this five days a week, nine months out of the year, with no paid time off. I thought, “It’s hard work being a kid.” Once I had that line, that being a kid is this job, it wasn’t much of a stretch to get to the book.

What convinced you that a book called The Retired Kid would find an enthusiastic audience? 

I hate the word “resonate,” but as soon as I started sharing this idea, more than any book I’ve shared with people, I had grownups—parents, teachers—saying, “When is this book coming out? You’ve got to publish that now !” This is an issue that everybody is involved in. With their super, super competitive, very active lives, kids have no room for free time or lazing around. They have schedules, calendars, birthday parties, and after school programs can be as intense as school activities. I was struck by the scene I saw coming off the bus that day. It had a domino effect—when I talked about it I got all these nodding heads.

Do you believe today’s children need a break, as your main character says?

Actually I’m not sure. I don’t have kids, but I have nieces and nephews and they seem pretty grounded. I certainly remember not being crazy about responsibilities, but in the long run, homework wasn’t so bad. I don’t think I set out to make any kind of dogmatic statement, and the book ends with the kid coming back from Florida.

Your illustrations of Florida suggest golden-years peacefulness, yet you use a rough line to draw activity. What media do you use, and how would you describe your visual style?

I used gouache and black pencil, sort of a wax pencil. I wanted a palette of blue skies, green palm fronds, pastel colors, and I like that crayony pencil and that very loose line, which I also used in Milo’s Hat Trick. I loved the way that Milo turned out, and I wanted to have that same sketchy style.

Also, there was an opportunity [in The Retired Kid] to have a lot of pages with little vignettes, lots of clips of stuff that’s going on, single small images that illustrate all the different scenes that get played out. First there’s the kid’s litany of chores and responsibilities, and then later this litany of stuff that doesn’t agree with him at the retirement home. It’s a breezy kind of story—a lot of white space, a lot of vignettes—and I thought it should have a light touch. There are a couple of pictures I really likethat came from early sketches, like the picture of him dancing with an old lady.

Do you think that revision destroys the freehand look of original sketches? 

I’ve been there! I’m guilty! I know. I’ve talked about that with other people in the business. I remember even Sendak talking about it as a struggle: you refine, refine, refine your sketches to the one you’re going to do in the book, and you want to keep that kind of life in the picture after you’ve drawn it about 80 times. You think, “Can I keep that life, that spontaneity, that excitement?”

Besides its visual resemblance to Milo’s Hat Trick (a book about a middle-aged magician), The Retired Kid also depicts older people for young readers. Similarly, your book Terrific describes a curmudgeon and Nothing is about a balding shop owner. What makes crotchety characters appealing to you?

A reviewer at the New York Times wrote that I was chronicling the masculine midlife crisis for the preschool reader. I don’t know exactly why I’ve written so many books about older people. I suppose there is something inherently funny about seeing older people in compromising and goofy situations, and I like poking fun at people who take themselves seriously when kids are more lighthearted. I also grew up with the poems of Edward Lear, and it seemed liberating to see grownups doing weird and silly things.

The Retired Kid satirizes retirees as much as the idea of envying retirement. Were there any plot directions you omitted or reinforced as you refined the work?

Lots. There was one in which it was a retirement home for kids, which I thought was a pretty hilarious idea: when he got to Florida he found out he wasn’t the first, he was part of a movement. But what I had was that the retirement home for kids was not necessarily a playful place—more like a sanatorium or hospital ward where you didn’t want to raise your voice too loud. So, yeah, parents might not approve.

I tried out different ideas of what would happen: how he would liberate the other kids, whether he should be in a retirement home with old folks, how he would come to the conclusion that he doesn’t fit. The retirement home for kids—maybe that’s the sequel, I don’t know!