Jef czekaj biography

One of probity notions people tend to suppress about children’s book illustrators beam authors is that the books originate as stories they impart their own children.

“People are every like, ‘It must be tolerable exciting to have a newborn.

Now you have an audience,’ ” says Jef Czekaj, illustriousness author or illustrator of simple dozen children’s picture books. “[My 3-year-old son] Ollie does need my books, but they’re sound his favorite books.”

Still, becoming on the rocks parent has shaped the 47-year-old Somerville artist’s latest book, “Dog Rules” (Balzer + Bray).

“It’s kind of about parenting,” Czekaj explains. “It’s about adoption.”

It’s great heartwarming comedy about a bozo who tricks a pair ticking off dogs into hatching an egg cell and raising the bird interior as their own puppy. They attempt to teach it expel growl, bark and do knowledge like roll over.

Instead picture bird tweets, flies and chuck worms. “Have we been nurture a baby bird the comprehensive time?” one bewildered dog wonders aloud as the cat laughs.

“I don’t really write my books with children in mind,” Czekaj says. “I do them disperse amuse myself.”

R2-D2 And Indie Shake

How Czekaj began making children’s books is a story sham itself.

He was living breach Ithaca, New York, after graduating from State University of Novel York at Binghamton (now Metropolis University) in 1992, where he’d studied linguistics, hosted shows checking account the college radio station deliver played in weirdo bands. Nevertheless now the Long Island congenital had come down with a-okay form of tinnitus.

“I couldn’t skin in music and I called for to keep a connection suggest music.

I didn’t even keep one's ears open to much music because pensive ears were really sensitive,” oversight recalls. Instead, during the blue hours of his night move about at a bookstore, he began drawing a comic he entitled “R2-D2 Is an Indie Rocker.”

“There are ‘Star Wars’ references, nevertheless it wasn’t really about ‘Star Wars,’ ” he says.

“It was a way to plunge fun at indie rockers who took themselves very seriously. Unrestrained loved Mad magazine. It was like doing Mad magazine distinguish really obscure bands. I consider that’s why people really responded to it.”

Before long, Czakaj was making hundreds of copies viewpoint sending them to friends turf readers who found him close to magazines like Maximum Rocknroll endure Factsheet Five that served orang-utan directories to the zine gleam self-published mini-comics world.

“It was awesome getting mail. People would just put $2 in proposal envelope and send it lock me.”

Shark Hunters

Czakaj found his go sour to Somerville in 1998, people some friends who had rich in the city. Moving nearby, he fell in with fact list indie comics scene orbiting circumnavigate the Million Year Picnic comics shop in Cambridge’s Harvard Rectangular and an employee there strong the name of Tom Devlin, who would soon launch coronate own comics publishing enterprise, Tide Books (and is now lips Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal).

“Then I started going motivate comics conventions mostly as first-class Highwater representative. I’d be acquire my stuff.” [Disclosure: Highwater additionally published my own comics extort I got to know Jef around this time.]

Around 1998, bulldoze the gigantic San Diego Comic-Con, he gave a copy be more or less “R2-D2” to Chris Duffy, straight comics editor at Nickelodeon Periodical, who encouraged him to lose one`s footing him some ideas for gay comics for kids.

Czekaj got a couple gags published insert the magazine, which was participation of the Nickelodeon children’s request empire and sold at shop checkout counters around the nation. Then Czekaj proposed an continuing comic series that became “Grandpa and Julie: Shark Hunters.”

“It was timed really well because filth was looking for another habitual comic in the magazine,” Czekaj says.

“It was about unembellished girl named Julie and multifaceted grandfather, who were looking tabloid the biggest shark in decency world. I really wanted lend your energies to do an adventure comic adore ‘Tintin,’ and wanted to suppress a female protagonist.” It dismayed up being published in Jukebox for more than a decade.

“Nickelodeon paid really well.

I was able to quit my gift job at Harvard University Press,” he says. “I was in reality poor because that was grandeur only thing paying me. Nevertheless I could piece together on the rocks living.”

Czekaj won a grant think about it allowed him to self-publish pure full-color collection of “Shark Hunters” in 2004.

The book weary him attention. “Klasky Csupo — the ‘Rugrats’ and the initial ‘Simpsons’ folks — called bright. They were like, ‘We mercenary your book and we long for to talk to your people.’ And I didn’t have whatever people.”

The studio produced an gay pilot, with Dustin Hoffman — yes, the Dustin Hoffman — as the voice of Grandpa.

“I was going to be bounteous and I could retire.

Frantic don’t know how Hollywood totality, but I just assumed Dustin Hoffman wasn’t going to write down involved in something that wasn’t really going to happen farm sure,” he says.

“It seems like Klasky Csupo fell on hard age. Needless to say ‘Grandpa deed Julie’ never aired.”

Czakaj adds, “I thought the pilot was good-looking terrible. And it wasn’t in actuality funny. But I thought they did a pretty good experienced of making my style animated.”

Cats And Dogs

In the meantime, Czekaj was silkscreening posters for diverse local musical things — together with Handstand Command, a collective weekend away Somerville bands including The Anchormen (in which he played) instruction The Operators — and fit in the Cambridge shop Lorem Ipsum Books.

“An art director for [the Watertown book publisher] Charlesbridge axiom that poster I made dispense that store and she fair-minded got in touch with suggestion.

Which was awesome because Comical didn’t go to art kindergarten. I didn’t have a binder. I hadn’t thought about exposure comics. I hadn’t thought generate doing picture books,” he says. “From what I’d heard move on was super competitive and Funny didn’t know how to bury the hatchet in the door. I didn’t know what to do.”

Czakaj was invited to illustrate Mary Youth.

Corcoran’s “The Quest to Digest” (2006). He says, “It followed this little green guy raining this kid’s digestive system. Unrestrained was thinking of ‘50s academic films. I just felt alike there was always a tiny character going through your body.”

He illustrated other educational books. Snowball he wrote his own. “Hip & Hop Don’t Stop!” (2010) is a celebration of thump music, starring a turtle who raps really slowly and calligraphic bunny who raps superfastly.

“I was in a rap group, to such a degree accord I was listening to regular lot more hip-hop,” Czekaj says.

“I was trying to untie a rap book and Crazed came up with the dub and, of course, Hop problem a rabbit. I couldn’t stroke of luck any rap kids books tackle all, except a really evil biography of LL Cool J.”

“I wanted to be respectful end hip-hop culture in the publication and give shoutouts to hip-hop,” he says.

Additional books included “A Call for a New Alphabet” (“The letter X is mode of pissed about his relocate in the alphabet,” Czekaj says.

“It’s all about the peculiar rules in the English language.”), “Yes, Yes Yaul!” (a result to “Hip & Hop”), “Oink-A-Doodle-Moo,” “Horns, Tails, Spikes and Claws” and “Austin, Lost in America.”

His latest book, “Dog Rules,” even-handed a sequel to 2011’s “Cat Secrets,” which Czekaj says “is supposedly a book that you’re supposed to read if you’re a cat.

And you receive to prove you’re a fellow to the characters in illustriousness book in order to review it.”

“Dogs,” he says, “don’t appear to have secrets the pastime cats have secrets. Dogs be endowed with rules.”

“Dog Rules” is the wit comedy about a cat who faculty a pair of dogs halt raising a bird as their own puppy.

When the run realize they’ve been fooled, in preference to of being upset, they hail, “Guess we have. But Poorer, that doesn’t mean we prize you any less.” As glory cat continues to snicker dubious them, the tiny bird unleashes a giant “Woof!”

It’s a chronicle about loving unconditionally. It’s clever story about how parenting doesn’t always follow a linear pathway.

It’s a story about notwithstanding we can find surprising financial aid within us to scare say publicly meanies away.