Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto

the Triple Threat for children and non-children

Earlier this month, the new edition of Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto came out from Enchanted Lion. I worked on this book for a few years, and it’s so good to finally see it in print!

It’s a satirical tale by Gianni Rodari, and you can read about it (and the author) in this recent NYT article by Mac Barnett.

cover sketch

Allegedly, it’s a children’s book, though I had a good time reading and rereading it, and I am technically no longer a child. It has that unpredictable quality that you can find in Calvino, Aira, and co—a sense of the narrator coming up with the events as they unfold.

Here I thought I should share some of my favorite illustrations from the book. All of them are spots, and there’s a lot of them.

I wanted to evoke the feeling of finding a dusty old book with scribbled drawings all over the margins, made by some mischievous child from the past (you can hear all about my adventures with school marginalia in the latest episode of Two Librans, btw).

Everything was done straight in Procreate on my iPad, in two layers. I didn’t really want to rely on color overlaps, the way I often did in the past, so the illustrations are mostly monochrome, with the second color used here and there for accent.

Initially, I wanted to do no sketches at all, to keep things loose, but that proved a bit too optimistic, and even with some planning, we had 20-something versions of the book dummy, because most of the illustrations had various tricky text wraparounds, so adding one or removing another could break the whole chapter.

This project was an interesting transition into my current style, a kind of preparation for Foghorn. After my very complicated last book, Tous Les Vivants (which should finally come out in English this year), I wanted to strip things down to essentials—just 2-3 brushes, with everything kept flat and straightforward.

Above are some of the style tests. I did a lot of variations on practically every other illustration in the first chapter, to get the feel for it, before moving on too far.

The sketches were very loose, though. Mostly just blocking out compositions and various directions and proportions. I wanted to have a clear rhythm in each image, a certain musicality, so planning that was important.

I took quite a few liberties with character design, and tried to keep everything very tight and loose at the same time, maintain clear shapes while allowing for plenty of room for variation. I didn’t want anyone to look exactly as you’d expect them, but also didn’t want to go too wild.

the bell tower had to be cut in the print version to fit the page

The baron was an interesting challenge—I had to draw a very old and frail man, who also (spoiler alert) grows young and strong, and eventually turns into a child. So I went for a bird-like shape, focusing almost the entirety of his design on his curvaceous nose.

The stiff fellow with the umbrella is Lamberto’s butler. I wanted to get away from the usual stereotypical butler look, and turned him into a kind of tripod.

The thing about illustrating other people’s characters, I always feel very wary of imposing my vision on the reader, but I hope the looseness and unfinishedness of my style hopefully leaves enough room for that vision to remain open to interpretation.

The book is quite dark, so I had a lot of fun drawing various acts of violence, and death in general: funferall was had by all. Btw, you can read more about my thoughts on character design here and here.

As for the story, it’s funny and wild, touching on class, extremism, and bullshit jobs (a theme very dear to my heart, and central to my own comic-in-progress, if you’ve been following that). Despite some heavy and dark themes, there’s a lightness through all of it, which I find deeply inspiring.

There’s no mention of any cats in the text, so that was a huge liberty on my part, but as a cat man, I can’t not include one in such a long book. I think there’s a dog, too.

There are a lot more, but I won’t spoil things any further! The book should be available in bookstores and online shoppes.

Check out the publisher for other Rodari books, illustrated by my old pals/colleagues JooHee Yoon, Matt Forsythe, and Dasha Tolstikova, among others.