Fuse 8 n’ Kate: The Three Pigs by David Wiesner

I think it all began with my recent publisher preview featuring the book Who’s Writing This Story?! by Robin Newman. Best described as yet another meta fourth-wall bursting picture book with The Three Little Pigs as its focus, it got me to thinking. What is it about those darn pigs and picture book meta-analysis? First you get The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka and then, not too long after, there was The Three Pigs by David Wiesner. Of course, the moment I thought that I realized, to my horror, that somehow we’d never covered this book on the podcast. Indeed, I can’t think of the last time I flipped through a copy myself. To the library! Today, we do our second David Wiesner book (after Tuesday). Along the way we discuss the philosophy behind Wiesner’s void (“Is this just the space between the stories we tell?”) and how this is (spoiler alert) our 200th classic on the podcast! Woohoo!

Listen to the whole show here on Soundcloud or download it through iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, PlayerFM, Audible, Amazon Music, or your preferred method of podcast selection.

Show Notes:

Here is the David Wiesner speech which, you will see, ALSO mentions Trina Schart Hyman. She’s apparently is the Kevin Bacon of Caldecott Award speeches.

This would not necessarily be a book we’d think of when we thought about unreliable narrators in picture books, but when you consider the difference between what is happening in the art and what the child is being told, I’d say this counts.

If you took a thousand pigs over a thousand years, surely one would be able to make a paper airplane, right? In spite of the fact that they have no opposable thumbs.

There’s something intensely personal about one of the pigs looks so closely at the reader like this. PIG IN YOUR FACE!!! If you have a fear of pigs (which may or may not be called porcophobia) don’t read this book.

For the record, my memory wasn’t wrong. Prior to the publication of this book (in 2001) Wiesner had already illustrated a dragon before. It was in the 1987 publication The Loathsome Dragon.

Beware the Creeping Duck. “If you look in those eyes long enough, you see your own soul.”

You can’t help but notice that Wiesner has apparently done a fish version of his previous hit Tuesday in the panels here.

By the way, for whatever reason I took an inordinate amount of time to peer and try to read what this final panel of the dragon’s story actually says. As far as I can make it out it reads, “The next day the prince entered the enchanted woods and knelt beneath the old tree as the wolf had instructed.” Never mind that the previous page featured a frog/toad and not a wolf.

Though it does seem to have a bit of a Magritte feel to it, this back cover shot of the third pig’s house is just rather beautiful in and of itself.

If you don’t believe me about the fact that David Wiesner did art for an E.T. novelization, you can find the proof of the matter here. If you give it the requisite 10-15 minutes of your time, the read is more than worth your while. Contains the line Wiesner would like as his epitaph someday: “His art’s too damn tasteful!”

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Filed under: Fuse 8 n' Kate