In October, a children’s non-fiction book that I illustrated and co-authored with my wife, Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris, was published in the USA. Entitled Plague-busters!, it’s a fun romp through the history of how medicine dealt with a handful of the world’s deadliest diseases. These include rabies, scurvy, and the Black Death.
Lindsey and I have always found that we work very well together creatively, and we are always each other’s first port of call when one of us needs a verdict on the other’s work. We were looking to collaborate on something, and since we both love delivering history in engaging ways, combining our skills in a kids’ book seemed the way to go.
It’s a real privilege to have the chance to reach young minds and, hopefully, spark imaginations. And imagination is an underrated vehicle for finding a way into history. I feel that kids are always excited by anything that encourages them to look at things differently. As there can be some resistance to history from children, peppering the book with gross-out humour, bizarre factoids, cartoons, and caricatures to bring the past to life for them was an exciting prospect to us.
My love of 18th-century caricatures helped with illustrating this book, as I wanted to give the drawings something of an old-timey feel. And I tried to remember what I enjoyed in book illustrations when I was a kid, which was a lot of detail, a good pinch of weirdness, and a lot of dark humour.
Also, I wanted to shoehorn as many caricatures into Plague-busters! as possible. Kids love caricature, and there isn’t enough of it around these days. There are a lot of famous historical names in the book, and the faces attached to those names are sometimes very familiar (e.g. Shakespeare), but when they weren’t, a caricature was a great way to give a historical moniker some personality.
Choosing what to draw is also key. Some stories cry out for an illustration, and instinct tells you where a reader is going to expect to see one. That doesn’t just apply to the big historical moments, but the smaller, quirkier or grossest moments too.
Occasionally, though, less is more. If I thought we had written a vivid enough picture in words, I didn’t try to gild the lily with a drawing. The imagination can do as much, if not more, than a cartoon. Illustrations should be used only if they enhance the reader’s experience, or help them think about a passage of text in a left-field way.
We wrote the book in the midst of the global health crisis too, so we didn’t have to explain too much about what pandemics are, because everyone of all ages is now very clear on that. The Covid experience helped kids relate to the past more easily, because we talk a lot about vaccines and historical quarantine measures. And there’s one cartoon, right at the end of the book, where we show a 17th-century plague doctor next to their modern equivalent of a healthcare worker in a hazmat suit. There’s now a lot of cultural and scientific literacy amongst kids around these kinds of medical measures. Everyone now knows what a spiky virus looks like too, so we could include one on the cover without worrying that kids wouldn’t know what it is.
I used a lot of photo references for nearly every illustration, not just to help with making a nice drawing, but often to give as much historical accuracy as I could, without being neurotic about it. Getting clothes and uniforms right, and nailing backgrounds, like the slums of Five Points in New York, was enjoyable work.
But when it came to the cover, I couldn’t find a suitable, off-the-peg reference photo from which to work. So I grabbed a Venetian mask we had lying around the house, bought a cheap monk’s outfit online, and had Lindsey pose in full plague doctor costume. This was above and beyond the call of duty, as she was coming to terms with a breast cancer diagnosis she had received a couple of days before. But playing dress-up was a distraction for us both, and a light moment in a dark hour.
At any rate, I can report that marital harmony is unaffected, as we are now working on our second children’s book, Dead Ends! This will look at the battle between success and failure through medical history. Can’t wait to crack the pencils out for that one.