Three Years Mimicking Eric Carle for a Parody Nobody Asked For

A journey of unmatched ambition and questionable achievement

Picture by Author

The idea was simple enough.

It just didn’t turn out that well.

Thus is life.

Fast forward 100+ hours and three years later and I’m waiting for my brand new shiny book to arrive from overseas (most of you are on the sending side of the aforementioned sea).

The first time around, we (myself and an astonishingly talented Taiwanese artist friend) created a mockery of a classic children’s concept; a simple ABC book.

I’ve always been a big news consumer — for better or worse — and despite all my wasted time reading article after article about the state of affairs of World Politics in 2020, no one ever answered a simple premise: could Donald Trump actually read and write?

From that thought, mixed in with a bit of snarky dark humor I love so much, came our masterpiece:

Picture by Author

Silly concept.

Hilarious (if I do say so myself).

Brilliant drawings.

But — and there’s always a but — the days of advertising political products were drawing scorn from the powers at be. And the powers at be at my hateorite monopoly, Amazon, deemed this silly hilarious brilliantly drawn work of satire to be political.

And so did Facebook and possibly Google. I can’t quite remember.

Whatever the case, I couldn’t pay to advertise the book. And according to one of my ‘real’ writer friends (he writes more than 100 words in his published books, if you can believe it); advertising is sadly required to make any sort of decent sales when self-publishing.

Still, the journey was fun, a bit frustrating, and exhilarating to hold the final copy in my hands.

It even sold around 500 copies.

It was (and is!) even more enjoyable to watch friends and strangers browse through the pages and watch as they laugh or twist their faces trying to get the joke. It was also, as it turned out, a great way to see what a stranger’s political leanings were — before ever hearing a single word out of their mouth!

I was hooked.

I told my folks I wanted to make one funny book a year going forward.

3.25 years later, here we are.

Is procrastination a lifestyle choice?

The Return

The new idea was simple.

Let’s continue poking fun at the disgustingly rich.

But, this time, be allowed to advertise it.

After a lot of obsessive dilly-dallying (the Patented Pryor Process!), I settled on this train of thought:

1. Let’s be more parody parody this time.

2. Still imitate a famous children’s book, because the juxtaposition is just hysterical (if you also find yourself with a warped sense of humor).

3. Let’s stay apolitical this time.

4. Go after billionaires!

Lo and behold, I came across an old book I think I loved as a child.

Screenshot from Amazon

For those unaware, Bill Martin Jr and Eric Carle made a huge number of kid’s books over the years. Bill sold over 12 million copies and Eric over 170 million!

The book above is probably sitting around 10 million copies — and it was even banned in Texas, because, well, idiots do idiotic things.

Plus, just look at that art style.

Even a kid could draw it, right?!

Right?

So, off to the races we went.

“Not all who wander are lost, but some of us did end up at a llama farm instead of the beach.”

Before we move on, there’s a few things I need to point out:

1. My amazing artist friend moved across the world. (Sucks, but she’s doing awesome, and likely still has access to a plethora of tea, guvna.)

2. I joined forces with a fellow non-artist who at least knew how to sketch.

3. I vastly underestimated the amount of effort required to create what appears to be Eric Carle’s deceptively simple children’s books. (Perhaps that was kind of his point?)

The first plan of action was the easiest part — create the words.

After all, it’s a kids book, there’s only, like, five words in the entire thing, right?

2.5 years later, we had our final draft.

Turns out, meeting once or twice a month and trying to imitate the perfected poetry of one of the world’s most famous children’s book authors, was slightly more complicated than we envisioned.

Rhyming style.

Oh god, I hate rhymes.

So that much I love them.

There is a beat to Brown Bear, one I was completely unaware of.

As someone whose oft been described as tone-deaf when it comes to music, perhaps I still am.

Then you have the specific number of syllables.

And the fact that every single page of the very short book (there’s only 13 images, 13 questions, and 13 answers) followed nearly the exact same schema.

Hell, halfway through, we had used laptops, computers, tablets, and good ol’ pen and paper to try to make all this work.

Fitting a completely different subject — how the rungs of society now work — onto Bill and Eric’s simplistic masterpiece was just short of doing rocket science as a monkey.

But, with hard work, comes the lure of one of society’s most pervasive traps — the sunk cost fallacy.

We had simply come too far to turn back.

But in the end, we eventually finished the final draft.

We were satisfied.

A beautiful parody, here we come!

Next Step: Mission Impossible

For those keen readers still with me, you might find yourself asking something like, ‘How do two non-artists create a book of artwork?’.

Frustration, dear friends.

Lots and lots of beautiful frustration.

You see, it turned out the original books by Eric Carle weren’t drawings, per se.

Mistake #1.

Eric’s process, which we finally found some helpful Youtube videos to imitate, involved a few steps to create the bear on the cover you see above:

1. Very rudimentarily outline the drawing

2. Create a bunch of huge pallets from paint and glue and other fun craftworks

3. Cut each specific ‘body part’ with a knife on the drawing overlayed on the big pallets.

4. Paste them all together on another paper.

And so we drew up a plan. Then recreated the plan a dozen times. Sketched out the 13 images dozens of times over dozens of concepts and made sure they matched the meticulously rhymed parody satirization of society and got to work.

My favorite part?

Picture by Author

Being a kid and painting these giant pallets with brushes and objects and hands and fingers!

Picture by Author

Fun. Impractical. Hilarious.

Picture by Author

And a good excuse to take a slow relaxing train ride up to the next town where my friend lives, grab some beers, and spend a couple afternoons finger painting.

The next step we had to improvise a bit.

Question: What didn’t Eric Carle have back in 1967 when his book came out?

Answer: High-definition scanners, that’s what!

In which case, he might’ve ended up with something far more practical than a warehouse full of giant painted papers, like this:

Picture by Author

Textures for days! (As the kids might say.)

So now we had a bunch of textures and bunch of simple outlines on all on those fancy computers we all love so much.

And then we had to learn how to use Photoshop.

Sigh.

And by we, I really mean my co-author, as he put in far more work on this part of the journey (thanks!).

At some point in this journey, we had to use what I think proper designers call ‘layers’.

So many layers.

So, so many layers.

For example, when working on what turned out to be my favorite image, here it is about halfway through:

Picture by Author

Note the zombie-ish color scheme?

That’s how we interpreted each ‘body part’ that needed to be cut out from the giant painted pallets. Each part was colored with auto-fill to give us a general idea of what we wanted the final look and feel to be.

But after, instead of physically cutting, we pasted zoomed-in segments of our own giant-but-scanned painted paper pallets.

Take the outline of the face for example. We took up the nice real-textured blue:

Picture by Author

And then played around with the hue a bit:

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And voila, a textured forehead and no more zombie eyes:

Picture by Author

And voila-er, the final product:

Picture by Author

The Book Has Arrived

I wrote most of this post a few weeks ago. Since then, the two rounds of ‘proof’ copies and later (after fixing some dumb overlooked mistakes), the final copies.

A) It’s a thing of beauty to finally hold something in your hands that took years to make.

B) There’s something not quite right with the new books.

We ordered a bunch of ‘author’ copies — owned books that Amazon let’s authors order at a reduced price — so we’d have a couple to keep and a couple to hang up in local bars we frequent.

We also bought extra copies of the ABCs book since it’s hard to order stuff from Amazon into Taiwan and somehow, somehow, a few people every month keep asking to buy a copy.

The weird part?

Both books have the same exact settings for printing on Amazon, and yet the new book clearly feels a bit, unpolished, in terms of quality.

Very disappointing, especially when you compare the two side by side.

Our best guess? The ABCs book has full color background on the pages, whereas the new Billionaire book is mostly white background.

Lesson learned.

Another thing we realized? The original Brown Bear book had all of its characters laid horizontally across both pages (think of a normal children’s book spread).

We didn’t think of this part, and nearly all of the meticulously crafted characters are standalone on a single page.

It still looks cool (at least to us), but they seem almost lonely standing there amongst so much white space.

Lastly, when we started showing the book to friends of various senses of humor and political affiliations (part of the joys of expat life), I’d say about 90% of people had a chuckle or two, but didn’t realize it was a parody.

The thing is, that’s (partly) why we wrote “Unauthorized Parody” right on the cover!

It took some thinking and pondering before we finally realized the problem.

Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See has sold over 10 million copies, and the chances some of our friends have read it or use it to teach their kids or students is quite high.

We even asked most of them after, and a good many finally remembered the book after some memory jostling.

We realized it wasn’t that the book wasn’t famous or read by many people, it was that they read it when they were 2 and just didn’t remember!

In humor, context is everything.

And in written humor, context is literally the world the jokes preside within.

No context, and it’s as if one is only seeing half the joke.

So, is the book good?

Maybe.

Perhaps we were too stuck inside the process of creating it to truly grasp what other people would think of it, if they’d get the humor, and most importantly — if they’d like it.

As one friend said unprompted and quite strangely (especially in a Newfie accent), “I’m not gonna invest in this one, boys.”

So, then again, maybe it just sucked.

But still.

Holding something you created.

Something you spent over 3 years on.

Even if it was only part-time, even if it was fool hardy and based on an incorrect supposition of context, even if the book only sells 15 copies (it’s at 12 so far, wink wink), even if people hate it — we still made a piece of art.

And crappy art is still art.

That’s the beauty of it. The realization that no matter how quirky, niche, or downright bizarre your project may seem, it’s the act of creation that truly counts.

We dove headfirst into a sea of papers, paint, and glue, armed with nothing but a questionable sense of humor and a steadfast refusal to consider the practicality of our ambitions.

In the end, we emerged not just with a book, but with a tangible testament to human creativity, stubbornness, and the improved ability to laugh at ourselves.

So here’s to the dreamers, the creators, and the laughers. Here’s to making art that matters (even if it only matters to us). And here’s to the next ridiculous project.

Because, let’s face it, life’s too short to take seriously.

If you feel so inclined (and want to put a smile on my face), please check out Billionaire, Billionaire, What Do You Steal?

Picture by Author

Maybe you’ll like it? And we could sure use any reviews to help titillate the algorithms.

But if you don’t feel like spending any of your precious coins, don’t worry, I’ll send another post soon with all of the book’s pages on display.

Why, some might ask?

Because in the immortal words of Eric Carle:

“I believe that everything we do, everything we strive for, has a purpose. And that purpose is to bring joy to those around us.”

I couldn’t say it better myself.

Well, at least until the next parody of him.

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J.J. Pryor

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