From caterpillar to butterfly, ‘Papilio’ grows up in a new picture book

Transcript:

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Papilio is an enthusiastic and adventurous caterpillar.

BEN CLANTON: (Reading) Papilio can’t wait to join the world. Today is the day, she decides. She bursts out of her egg.

SIMON: And she becomes a chrysalis.

COREY R TABOR: (Reading) Growing up sure is weird sometimes, thinks Papilio. But as every caterpillar knows, you can’t become a butterfly without first becoming caterpillar soup. C’est la vie.

SIMON: Her main goal in life is to metamorphize into a butterfly and learn to fly.

ANDY CHOU MUSSER: (Reading) Wow. That flower looks yummy. I haven’t eaten in ages. I suppose I have to fly to get up there. But where do I start? Maybe like this? Nope. Definitely not like this.

SIMON: Papilio is a children’s story told in three parts about three stages of life. And it’s written and illustrated by three friends.

CLANTON: Most of the time.

MUSSER: That’s right (laughter).

TABOR: Yeah, yeah. We’ve known each other for a decade now, maybe plus.

SIMON: For our series Picture This, Ben Clanton, Corey R. Tabor and Andy Chou Musser talk about their cross-pollination – I mean, collaboration.

CLANTON: Andy and I were already making some books together, and we had so much fun doing that that we went, what would happen if we added another friend into the mix?

TABOR: When they asked me, I was surprised, but my answer was, yes, right away. It sounded like such a fun project. And I think in this line of work, just if something sounds fun, that’s a good enough reason to try it, and that’s where it started.

MUSSER: Correct me if I’m wrong, Corey. We talked to Corey one day, and he was like, I woke up in the middle of the night, and I had this idea of the stages of a butterfly, and we each write and illustrate a different stage.

TABOR: Yeah. I – we wanted to do the project because it would just be a fun thing to do between the three of us, but we thought that there needed to be some kind of a reason for three authors and illustrators to work together on a project. And the butterfly just seemed like a perfect way to kind of justify that and for each of us to show off our own voice and illustration style.

CLANTON: So her name’s Papilio. She’s a black swallowtail butterfly, or Papilio polyxenes. Am I getting that right? I hope so. The choice of species to begin with, that was Andy.

MUSSER: Ben and Corey were super generous and let me have a lot of say in what butterfly that we went with because I was illustrating the final chapter. And I looked at a bunch of different butterflies, and I thought, I want a fantastical-looking butterfly, but I also want one that is maybe a little bit unexpected. And so I thought, what if we chose a butterfly that had almost no color at all?

CLANTON: So we started out with the caterpillar phase. I took on that section. This is Ben. There’s four stages for a butterfly’s life. We get a little bit of egg time in the caterpillar section, and it’s really just about growing up. In the caterpillar phase, I was inspired by my youngest son and just this unstoppable wonder and curiosity he had, and I put a lot of that into Papilio’s character as she’s just entering this world.

MUSSER: Corey very courageously said that he would do the chrysalis section, which was a huge relief to me, because that one seemed like the toughest nut to crack.

TABOR: Yeah. I read somewhere when we were researching butterflies that when they go from caterpillar to chrysalis, they kind of dissolve into goo, and then they just kind of hang out for a week or so and rebuild their body. And the challenge with that was the character can’t really do anything. She’s just stuck inside of her chrysalis the whole time. So I think it was Ben or Andy who had the idea that the chrysalis itself would be going on this wild adventure while Papilio is completely oblivious inside. A bird has landed on her branch and is looking at her chrysalis, and then the bird grabs the chrysalis with her beak and flies off with it. And so then the bird fights with another bird over the chrysalis, and then the chrysalis goes flying through the air. So I kind of took that idea and just ran with it.

CLANTON: Something that I see within it is there’s a lot of uncertainty, but having to just kind of accept that? Like, she is changing, but she can’t impact the world around her. She just has to kind of trust in the process.

TABOR: Yeah. I think that’s probably something that’s familiar to children, too, that idea that things are happening around you and you’re growing, and some of the time, you just have to just go with it and see what happens. Originally, our idea was just change and transformation, the whole metamorphosis. And as we worked on it, it became more a story about growing up. And I think that kind of just happened naturally. The story changed as we worked on it.

MUSSER: In the butterfly section – this is Andy speaking – there’s a part where Papilio is very disappointed. Papilio has to learn to fly, and flying is a lot harder than Papilio expected. And we needed an expression of that disappointment, and I couldn’t think of one. And Corey had a great idea. He’s like, What if Papilio curses by saying, sluggety (ph) slime?

TABOR: Was that my idea?

MUSSER: Yeah.

TABOR: I don’t know if I can take credit for that. We had a meeting where we were trying to come up with the songs. And we had lots of ideas, but I think the ones that we went with were Andy’s.

MUSSER: Yeah. I think I started those off. I really like to make up silly songs. When we had the idea to write songs for Papilio, I was very excited and had a lot of ideas. We don’t have a melody or anything for Papilio songs, do we yet?

TABOR: Yeah. We never have.

CLANTON: I have a voice that sounds in my head, but do you guys each have a voice that sounds in your head?

MUSSER: I think this one’s on Ben. Go for it. Do you need the book? We have it here.

CLANTON: OK. When turning into a chrysalis, she goes, (reading in Papilio voice) got a full belly? Time to turn to jelly. I imagine it’s just like, you know, like a little kid at that point, kind of just making up as she goes, you know? (Reading in Papilio voice) Time to unfurl, then give these wings a whirl.

MUSSER: Excellent. Bravo.

CLANTON: That’s how it sounds in my head, at least. Yeah. I think we all agreed at the beginning that we like hapless heroes. That helped set the tone a bit. And then Corey also had finished this piece of the chrysalis flying through the air, and that’s where the palette, I think, kind of got established, where we’re like, oh, yeah, that’s nice.

MUSSER: I would say color-wise, soft pastel tones, a bit impressionistic. Some areas are painterly. Some areas feature a lot of collage. Some areas use linework.

CLANTON: My section tends towards cartoony at moments. Cartooning is kind of my go-to.

MUSSER: Corey’s section – Corey, what media do you use? I see – it looks to me like colored pencil or maybe crayon.

TABOR: Yeah. It’s color pencil and watercolor. I think I wanted it to have kind of, like, a loose, wild feel to it to kind of match the adventure that the chrysalis goes on while Papilio’s oblivious inside.

CLANTON: It has a very spring feel to me. Like, it feels like spring colors.

TABOR: Oh, yeah, I did that on purpose.

(LAUGHTER)

TABOR: One idea is that we would kind of retain our own illustration style and that – the idea that Papilio’s changing, and so each stage of life, she sees the world a little bit differently. So it makes sense that the illustrations would change a little bit with her.

CLANTON: We each used some of our own supplies. In the case of the caterpillar stage, given that it was, like, this kind of toddler – new to the world – that I took a similar let’s-explore, play approach with art. I ended up using all sorts of things. Anything I could get my hands on – watercolors, ink. I did leaf pressings, stamps, markers, colored pencil and collaged it all together.

MUSSER: For the butterfly section, I used gouache, which is a type of watercolor, and color pencil. I was a bit stumped about how to write the ending. And then I learned a really helpful fact, that butterflies, when they’re born, they don’t know how to fly, and it takes them some practice to learn how to use their wings. And that really informed how I wrote my section. I think Papilio really learns that it’s OK to fail and that practice is really important, and that being tenacious and trying something over and over again pays off.

TABOR: One great takeaway from the book is Papilio’s determination. Andy has a great section in his part where Papilio is like, I’m a butterfly, and I am going to fly, and just that, like – I don’t know – that determination is a great thing that you can take from this.

CLANTON: I think one of the things that Papilio discovers as she goes through this journey is that it’s OK to have help, to find a friend. That’s one of my favorite parts that ended up getting into the book, is we have this mouse that reoccurs throughout all three parts. And that friendship, I think, reflects our own sort of friendship, too, in the making of the book.

MUSSER: I hope that readers enjoy the story and they have a fun time, and I hope it encourages them to collaborate with the people around them. And instead of seeing other people or friends as competition, seeing them as potential partners for making something new.

SIMON: Andy Chou Musser, Ben Clanton and Corey R. Tabor talking about their children’s book, “Papilio.” Our series, Picture This, is produced by Samantha Balaban. And for more conversations like this one, you can head to npr.org/picturethis.

(SOUNDBITE OF POLO AND PAN’S “ZOOM ZOOM”)