Lark Pien: Word & Image

Image from blueapplebooks.com

Cover of Long Tail Kitty by Lark Pien

In Lark Pien's work word and image combine to tell captivating, cute, and witty stories. She started out creating mini comics and has adapted her work to create children's books. Her 1st book, Long Tail Kitty, is in the format of a comic book, but it is a children's book with a hard cover and soft watercolor illustrations. Her work has taken comic books to a younger level, while still remaining fun for an adult. My daughter is 4 years old and she can understand the story in a basic way without needing to read. This formatting disseminates comic style reading to young children in a simplistic way. There have been other comic style children's books that I have seen, but they mostly take the adolescent version and put it into a board book. Long Tail Kitty has the feel of a child's book. With whimsical illustrations and silly antics, Long Tail Kitty speaks to children. When Pien's words combine with her images there are layers of understanding demonstrating more than 'surface.' The witty attitude speaks to children and adults alike with it's exploration of abstract concepts and creative humor. Lark Pien has brought comic style reading to a younger generation of people and has used her art and creativity to incite a lifelong love for comics. She forges the way for the next generation of Comic Con attendees, and opens the doors to achieving a more widely understood style of communication. I had the pleasure of seeing her original artwork on display at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco in the exhibit Story Time! Graphic Novels for Kids of All Ages. The exhibit had a wide variety of graphic novel and comic artists on display, but none was as captivating as Lark Pien's cute stylized work. Her process and sketch work was on display, along with some original artwork. Reading about her process really demonstrated how she uses word and image to equal so much more than the sum of their parts. She creates while in the process, and learns the story herself as she draws. For creating the book she had to draw word bubbles separately from the illustrations, and the actual words separate from the bubbles. The creative process is so different from the final production process. Freely exploring and then refining combine, just as word and image combine, to make a complete whole. 

Lark Pien's Long Tail Kitty mini comic.
For a full version see her website archives

Read an interview with Lark Pien
Read Lark Pien's blog