Children’s picture books are a glorious art form – Written for the Washington Post, February 28, 2025

Mac Barnett, the new national ambassador for young people’s literature, explores innovative storytelling hiding in humble places all around us.

“Millions of Cats,” by Wanda Gág, was published in 1928. (Puffin)

By Mac Barnett

Behold, the picture book! The great and glorious literature hiding in humble places all around us: on the bottommost shelves of bookcases, in teetering stacks around kids’ bedrooms, inside plastic tubs at the pediatrician’s office. The picture book is a powerful, flexible art form whose audience — children — are keen and sensi.ve observers, new to our world and alert to its beauty and strangeness. These are ideal conditions for the creation of real art. So it should come as no surprise that some of the best books published in the last hundred years are children’s picture books.

But still, that is kind of surprising, right?

The picture book is often dismissed or even ignored. Partly, that’s because people don’t understand how picture books work. This is a unique art form with many formal peculiarities, most notably a sophisticated relationship between text and image. But the main reason we underestimate children’s picture books is that we underestimate children: how smart kids are, how deeply they feel and how much they understand.

A picture book is usually 32 pages long, sometimes a little longer, but very rarely more than 56. The story unfolds across page-turns, each one imbued with the anticipatory glee that

attends the raising of a curtain at the start of a play’s new act. Again and again, a new spread is revealed: two facing pages with words and pictures carefully arranged. In picture books, the text and illustration both tell the story, but they do different jobs. As the peerless picture-book maker Maurice Sendak put it: “Words are left out — but the picture says it. Pictures are left out — but the word says it.” (This is why so many great novelists write terrible picture books — they don’t know how to let the illustrations do the work.)

In “Millions of Cats,” a lonely woman dreams of having a furry friend, so her husband embarks on an adventure to find her one. (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers)

The picture book is a relatively new art form. For my money, the first true picture book is Wanda Gág’s “Millions of Cats,” published in 1928. In the 19th century, British illustrators like Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway published editions of nursery rhymes and fairy tales with inventive pictures that extended the story, but these artists were working with traditional texts. Gág — the daughter of Bohemian immigrants, raised in a German-speaking community in Minnesota — crafted a book that felt like a folk tale from the Old World but was something wholly new, an original story designed to be told with words and pictures both. Read today, “Millions of Cats” still feels fresh. It looks fresh too, with undulating layouts of entwining text and image. Because it was impossible to achieve this fluid look with contemporary typesetting technology, Gág had her brother hand-letter the book, establishing from the outset the picture book’s tradition of careful book design and innovative production techniques.

The picture book is a form, not a genre. If there’s an overabundance of simplistic picture books about cute animals learning Very Important Lessons, don’t blame the art form (and definitely don’t blame the kids). Insipid and didactic children’s literature is a failure of the grown-up imagination. Good children’s writers know that the picture book’s storytelling poten.al is boundless. Look at “Shortcut,” Donald Crews’s under-sung masterpiece. Crews, who, along with Richard Scarry and Anne Rockwell, is one of children’s literature’s great troubadours of transportation, is best known for the unexpectedly poignant concept book “Freight Train.” His “Shortcut” is a picture book thriller. Told in a first-person plural narration suffused with dread (“We should have taken the road”), this is a picture book about seven kids who take a shortcut along the railroad tracks and nearly get run over by a train. The middle section — in which the train hurtles relentlessly past, accompanied by the text “KLAKKITY-KLAK- KLAK-KLAK” — makes for a noisy, terrifying and totally entertaining read-aloud. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Carson Ellis’s “Du Iz Tak?” is written in an invented language. (Candlewick Press)

We’re still figuring out what picture books can do. A few times each year, while perusing the children’s section of my local bookshop, I’m startled by some new trick, technique or possibility unlocked by one of my contemporaries. Carson Ellis’s “Du Iz Tak?” tells the story of a flower sprou.ng, blooming and dying, but is written entirely in bug language. The adult reading the book aloud is reminded of what it’s like to be the kid listening, struggling to unlock obscure meanings from the letters on the page. And by the end, everyone has learned to speak Insect.

In X. Fang’s “Dim Sum Palace,” a little girl’s dreams take her to surprising places. (Tundra Books)

X. Fang’s “Dim Sum Palace,” with its riffs on Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen” (which itself riffed on Winsor McCay’s newspaper comics) marked a new moment of maturity for the picture book — a tradition with canonical texts ripe for reinterpretation. It’s both a homage and a wholly original artwork.

The picture book is children’s literature’s great formal contribution to literature as a whole. Yes, there have been great children’s novels, great children’s poetry and great children’s comics. But novels, poetry and comics would all exist without children’s books. Children’s writers invented the picture book.

You can see its influence in comics and even novels — Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro cited picture books as an inspiration for “Klara and the Sun.” In the last few years, there have even been some picture books published for adults (a category distinct from picture books marketed as books for children that appeal only to adults, a timeworn and thoroughly execrable tradition).

But the future of the picture book will always lie with children — a voracious and unorthodox readership. It is only right that the tradition of the picture book is a tradition of experimentation, for childhood itself is experimental, and our kids deserve a literature equal to their imaginations and worthy of their attention.

Mac Barnett is the 2025-2026 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Barnett is the author of more than 60 books for children, including “Twenty Questions” and “Sam & Dave Dig a Hole,” as well as the “Mac B., Kid Spy” series, “The First Cat in Space” graphic novels and “The Shapes Trilogy” picture books.