Say "yes" to the eyeball!

Where we make a book with a hole in it. And an eyeball.

Typically, when a book project comes my way, it’s in the form of a manuscript that an editor has sent to my literary agent, Steve, who then sends it to me. I read it, decide whether it’s something I want to have in my life for two or more years,¹ and we go from there. Not everything follows that pattern, and in this issue of Random Orbit, I’m going to tell you about one of the stranger projects I’ve worked on that was published just a few weeks ago. It was a weird process for a weird book, and appropriately, it’s all about Halloween.

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Sometime in the Spring of 2022, I began hearing whispers from Steve, my agent, about some sort of mysterious proposal with Penguin Workshop that was being called “The Eyeball Project.” This was strange in two ways: First, the only thing we knew about the book (we assumed it was a book) was that it had something to do with an eyeball. Second, in addition to illustrating this project, I was to write it as well.

But write what, exactly?

Steve asked me if this was something I wanted to do.

Well, let’s see: It’s a book, at least we think it’s a book, that I will illustrate, that somehow involves an eyeball, and haha, has no text or story or even concept because it still needs to be written. We have no timeline, no idea what the advance will be, and only a vague sense that it actually exists at all.

“Correct,” Steve said. “And it would be a great opportunity. So, do I tell them yes?”

Let’s get one thing straight. I have not gotten to where I am by saying no.

My first real job out of college was at a small specialty advertising company near Fort Worth. The owner was a frequent diner at the restaurant where I worked, and he asked me one night, while he was having dinner, if I knew how to use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. This was 1991, the cusp of the desktop revolution, and I’d graduated the year before from Parsons School of Design with no desktop experience at all. I’d seen Photoshop and Illustrator. And I knew that to do anything in this world that I wanted to do, I would need to learn them. But I didn’t know them. So I said yes. I was hired², I drove directly to a bookstore where I purchased books on Photoshop and Illustrator, and I read them, cover to cover, over the weekend before starting this job.³

The second time this happened was when the Museum of Modern Art called me in 2004 to design, illustrate, and animate an entire website for kids. The one question they had was whether I knew how to use Adobe Flash to animate. I did not, but I said yes. And I immediately set about learning Adobe Flash.

When opportunity knocks, open the door and say yes to the eyeball.

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Old Smokey, Spaghetti, Linguine

I heard nothing more about this eyeball project until March 2023, when I received an email from Steve with this photo:

In case it’s not clear, this is a board book containing ten blank pages, each with a hole in the middle, and attached to one side, visible through the hole, is a big ol’ plastic eyeball.

And this brief:

A silly and spooky spin on the classic song “On Top of Spaghetti”! On Halloween night, over a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, a skeleton sneezes… and POP! His eyeball bounces off the table, onto the floor, and right out the door. The mayhem continues all throughout town as Dracula, a mummy, a ghost, and a witch all chase after the runaway eyeball. Complete with an actual eyeball. That's our general guide for the book, but of course, we are open to Brian taking it into different creative paths. The book, at its heart though, should be silly and fun and spooky.

This was exciting. I love a good novelty gimmick book. I loved the idea of Halloween, and drawing skeletons, and noodles, and yeah, this was going to be fun. And it seemed simple. Ten pages! That’s just five spreads and a cover! Easy!

But as I looked at that photo and as I re-read the brief, I started finding some unusual problems I’d have to solve.

• A whole story, in just five spreads?

• They want it when?!

• It’s a song?! I don’t know how to write a song!

• It has to rhyme?

• The eyeball doesn’t move. So everything revolves around the eyeball?

• Wait, what do I do about the leftover hole on the other side of each spread?

In case you’ve not figured it out, the answer to all of these questions is YES. There are no problems. Instead, let’s just call them creative constraints and get to work.

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Get to work

Penguin Workshop had some legal issues to work out regarding the whole parody thing. So, we didn’t have a title yet, and I couldn’t start writing yet. I decided to focus on the cover. The first thing I thought of when I read the brief was an image of a skeleton eating pasta, with a “real” eyeball. So that’s where I began.

The team at Penguin loved this first try. Since we weren’t sure if we’d be able to use the word “spaghetti” at all, I suggested we use “linguine” as a placeholder, and it stuck. Using that initial drawing as a launchpad, I quickly landed on a cover design.

cover sketches

Throw linguine against the wall and watch it stick.

And as I began work on the final art for the cover, I also began writing.

Now, I’m no lyricist. And as simple as this task seemed, I struggled. The first verse came quickly.

On top of linguine all covered with cheese,
I lost my poor eyeball when Frankenstein sneezed.

Why is it Frankenstein sneezing? The brief says Dracula. Dracula also has three syllables, but Frankenstein sounded better. And I’d drawn these Frankenstein sketches that I knew I wanted to use.

way better than Dracula

This whole process took about five mornings of writing and, yes, singing to myself. I made lists of appropriate adjectives (gooey, squiggly, squishy, dark, spooky), and I wrote a map of the “story” idea (eyeball rolls out door, down alleyways, into graveyard).

It rolled off the table, dropped onto the floor,
squirming and squiggling, it snaked out the door.

Down the alley it bounced, all gooey and round,
waking the neighbors with weird squishy sounds.

Through dark spooky shadows, my eyeball did roll.
Then POOF! it was gone—down a dark graveyard hole.

With art direction as annotation:

• Down on the floor, heading outside, with Skeleton and Frankenstein giving chase, along with maybe a black cat and some bats or rats.

• Now we’re in some gothic old alleyway, moonlight above, windows lit with eyes — the eyes of the awakened neighbors — peeking out of them; some, like wolfman, a witch, crows, appearing to help chase down the eyeball along with Skeleton and Frank.

• Expressionistic shadows like Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, our chasers in silhouette on the left, eyeball in a spooky cemetery at right, falling into an open crypt.

At one point, I had the eyeball bounce through and out of the cemetery before I decided to have it vanish there instead. It rolled under cars. It was taken by the cat. It was eaten by a ghoul. The possibilities were endless. Finally, when I asked myself what was in the crypt, what would we see in that “dark graveyard hole,” and the Mummy popped into my head, I knew I had it. The eyeball ends up in the mummy’s eye socket, AND I get to play with the idea of the skeleton’s “dear old mummy.”

I peered o’er the gravestone and what did I see?
my dearest old Mummy peering right back at me!

• POV from inside the grave: Skeleton, Frank, cat, crow, bat, etc, above peeping with fright over a gravestone inscribed with ‘MY DEAR MUMMY, R.I.P.’ The eye has landed on the wrapped face of a disgusting mummy corpse, looking back at reader with its new eye and a big fat grin.

There was very little editing. Mainly, as I recall, it had to do with the idea of peering versus looking. To peer is funnier.⁴

And what did I see?

The hardest part of this project was hiding that hole on the left side of each spread. I had to find ways to lessen it, to make it irrelevant and just sort of disappear into the background. I surrounded it with pasta and snot, I hid it under a table, I tucked it between the skeleton’s limbs… generally, I just tried to make what was happening near it and around it way more interesting than the hole itself.

One thing I wasn’t expecting while writing was how the cat became sort of a main character. She’s never mentioned in the text, but once I began adding her to my sketches, I loved her out front, chasing that eyeball around. Not to mention, she fit the foreground perspective of the alleyway scene.

The whole project was done in less than four months, which seemed ironic to me after waiting almost a year to learn anything about the project in the first place.

I turned in the final artwork in August 2023, and then, of course, like all books, it all vanishes into some deep dark hole somewhere until, about a year later, a box appears on the porch containing actual books, covered in my drawings, with my name on it, with a hole in the middle of each page, and right there, in 3-D, a big ol’ plastic eyeball.

Here’s a video I made this week, a singalong for this book. I had to learn to play my accordion again (I used to be quite good with the thing), and I’ve never sung in public at all. So, this was a bit out of my comfort zone. But it was fun to make, and I hope it’s fun to watch.

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I’ve loved drawing skulls for centuries. I’m not necessarily one of those Halloween/365 types, but I do love drawing a dead guy. I attribute this to discovering Edward Gorey and his Gashleycrumb Tinies back in 1986. One of my favorite children’s books is Death, Duck, and the Tulip by Wolf Erlbruch, and another is The Skull by Jon Klassen. There are just so many things one can do with a skull. Here are some things I’ve done:

skulls since 2007, various media, for various reasons

Thanks for reading.

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1. Other considerations exist of course. Namely, financial ones. But usually, it’s just whether I like it or not.

2. I am pretty sure that when you need an art director for your small ad agency (calling it an ad agency is being generous) in the suburbs of Fort Worth, Texas, and your waiter happens to be a recent graduate from a prestigious design school in New York City, and would be willing to work for $19,000 a year, you look over things like interviews and resumés. The owner, David, was an opportunist, as was I.

3. I didn’t fool him, of course, but he knew chutzpah when he saw it. Also, less than two years later, I was working at Adobe HQ in California, designing packaging and marketing materials. So…

4. You might notice that I didn’t post any of the full-color finished illustration images. For that, you’ll have to get the book. Or watch the video!