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I didn’t mean to take more than a month off, I just got caught up in a bunch of stuff. I want to resume telling the story of my books. So I finished the tale of They’re Coming!, Shadows On My Wall and I Hate Picture Books!. The journey to publication of those three books was very much intertwined. I wrote about how Schiffer Publishing had said yes to those three plus Do Not Open The Box! Now I can explain why that one was not the next book to be published.

The origins of The Very Angry Puffin go a long way back. When I visit schools to do author presentations students often ask how long it takes to write a book. I mention that some books can take only a few days to get the initial story down and others can be worked and re-worked for longer. I then tell them that one of my books took me over 30 years to write. They looked stunned. I explain that it’s not like I sat at my desk for thirty years trying to write it but that the inspiration for the story happened that long ago.

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The Penguin House

In 1988 the Central Park Zoo reopened after having been closed for years for renovation. I remembered having visited it when I was a child and so I went to check out the changes. I went into the building called the Penguin House and found an exhibit of puffins off to the side of the penguins. I was enjoying looking at them when this guy walked by and said something like “That’s a funny looking penguin!” and then he walked away. It struck me as funny that he was wrong about what kind of bird it was and I thought the puffin was probably upset by people assuming it was a penguin.

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A puffin in the exhibit at the Central Park Zoo. It’s hard to judge his mood.

This idea of a cute little bird being really angry stuck with me. I drew a few sketches of an angry puffin. At the time I had recently graduated and had been working in animation. I thought that I could create a short film or draw a comic strip. I went on to work on a lot of other projects but occasionally the puffin would come back to me.

In 1992 I was asked to contribute to a book, 3-DIMENSIONAL ILLUSTRATION by my friend Ellen Rixford. It featured a few of my illustrations and Ellen also asked me to write and photograph a section on mold-making. To use as an example I sculpted a puffin character, not angry but perhaps a little sardonic.

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The cover and the puffin sculpt I did for the book 3-DIMENSIONAL ILLUSTRATION by Ellen Rixford.

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The spread on mold making from 3-DIMENSIONAL ILLUSTRATION.

Somewhere along the line I finished an illustration of an angry puffin character when I was beginning to work in Adobe Photoshop. He was very muscular, more like a comic book superhero than the version that would end up in my picture book.

So lets get back to my books. I was finishing up I Hate Picture Books! and I was thinking about what to follow it with. While I loved the story of Do Not Open The Box! I thought it was too sweet and nice to put out next. I wanted something a bit snarky and I remembered my puffin. In early drafts I had him breaking out of the penguin house and running rampant around the zoo. At one point I drew him grabbing a visitor to the zoo by his shirt. I re-wrote it a few times, finally keeping the story within the puffin exhibit.

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I included this spread in More Creatures and Characters: Drawing Awesomely Wild, Wacky and Funny Animals. Top Left shows the early, muscular puffin from a while ago. I also show development sketches of the puffin in progress.

I sent it to Schiffer and explained that I would like to hold Do Not Open The Box!. They liked The Very Angry Puffin and gave me a contract for it. I began tightening up the final draft and working on the final illustrations. Unlike the actual penguin house at the Central Park Zoo, I put both the penguins and puffin into the same space. When working on the style of illustrations I remembered how dark it is in the penguin house and how if you stand behind the other visitors they are silhouetted in from of the well-lit penguin exhibit. Having already worked with silhouettes in my other books it seemed only natural to work with them again. I don’t explain this in the book but my hope is that someone who has read the book will one day walk into the penguin house and say “Oh, now I get it!”

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Here are the silhouetted people in the book.

The book was mostly finished when I sent the cover art to Schiffer. Soon after came a request. They wanted to change the title from The Very Angry Puffin to The Angry Little Puffin. It was a small change but it was the first time one of my titles would be changed. I thought it over and decided it worked better. It softened it a bit by pointing out the ridiculousness of this cute, little bird being so irate. It also balanced better when I changed the graphic where the puffin has crossed out the words “Happy” and “Penguin” in the title treatment.

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The evolution of a book title.

The book was published in fall 2014. I was reminded recently on Facebook that it was 5 years ago with the photo below. I’ve been very pleased with the response to the puffin. A number of readers have told me he’s their favorite and I’ve been sent a lot of fan art. It has even lead to my first sequel, more on that later.

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A few months after the book came out I visited the Central Park Zoo.
They had a display of The Angry Little Puffin and kids were reading it.