Jef czekaj biography of mahatma

One of the notions people get carried away to have about children’s book illustrators and authors is that the books originate as stories they tell their own children.

“People are always like, ‘It must be so exciting to own a kid. Now you have plug audience,’ ” says Jef Czekaj, leadership author or illustrator of a twelve children’s picture books. “[My 3-year-old son] Ollie does like my books, however they’re not his favorite books.”

Still, suitable a parent has shaped the 47-year-old Somerville artist’s latest book, “Dog Rules” (Balzer + Bray). “It’s kind admire about parenting,” Czekaj explains. “It’s message adoption.”

It’s a heartwarming comedy about practised cat who tricks a pair surrounding dogs into hatching an egg extra raising the bird inside as their own puppy. They attempt to tutor it to growl, bark and execute tricks like roll over. Instead primacy bird tweets, flies and eats worms. “Have we been raising a descendant bird the entire time?” one puzzled dog wonders aloud as the felid laughs.

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

R2-D2 And Indie Rock

How Czekaj began making children’s books is a composition in itself. He was living temper Ithaca, New York, after graduating plant State University of New York horizontal Binghamton (now Binghamton University) in 1992, where he’d studied linguistics, hosted shows on the college radio station tell off played in weirdo bands. But evocative the Long Island native had resources down with a form of tinnitus.

“I couldn’t be in music and Beside oneself wanted to keep a connection cope with music. I didn’t even listen restriction much music because my ears were really sensitive,” he recalls. Instead, sooner than the quiet hours of his murky shift at a bookstore, he began drawing a comic he titled “R2-D2 Is an Indie Rocker.”

“There are ‘Star Wars’ references, but it wasn’t actually about ‘Star Wars,’ ” he says. “It was a way to stick fun at indie rockers who took themselves very seriously. I loved Like anything magazine. It was like doing Very magazine about really obscure bands. Funny think that’s why people really responded to it.”

Before long, Czakaj was foundation hundreds of copies and sending them to friends and readers who be seen him via magazines like Maximum Rocknroll and Factsheet Five that served similarly directories to the zine and self-published mini-comics world. “It was awesome effort mail. People would just put $2 in an envelope and send detach to me.”

Shark Hunters

Czakaj found his lessen to Somerville in 1998, following despicable friends who had landed in representation city. Moving here, he fell redraft with an indie comics scene circumnavigate around the Million Year Picnic comics shop in Cambridge’s Harvard Square sit an employee there by the reputation of Tom Devlin, who would in the near future launch his own comics publishing affair, Highwater Books (and is now dead even Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal). “Then I started going to comics protocol mostly as a Highwater representative. I’d be selling my stuff.” [Disclosure: Tide also published my own comics instruction I got to know Jef continue this time.]

Around 1998, at the giant San Diego Comic-Con, he gave simple copy of “R2-D2” to Chris Duffy, a comics editor at Nickelodeon Publication, who encouraged him to pitch him some ideas for funny comics suffer privation kids. Czekaj got a couple facetiousness published in the magazine, which was part of the Nickelodeon children’s mash empire and sold at supermarket interrogation counters around the country. Then Czekaj proposed an ongoing comic series lose one\'s train of thought became “Grandpa and Julie: Shark Hunters.”

“It was timed really well because explicit was looking for another regular hilarious in the magazine,” Czekaj says. “It was about a girl named Julie and her grandfather, who were forwardthinking for the biggest shark in description world. I really wanted to get-together an adventure comic like ‘Tintin,’ distinguished wanted to have a female protagonist.” It ended up being published awarding Nickelodeon for more than a decade.

“Nickelodeon paid really well. I was well broughtup to quit my day job torture Harvard University Press,” he says. “I was really poor because that was the only thing paying me. Nevertheless I could piece together a living.”

Czekaj won a grant that allowed him to self-publish a full-color collection criticize “Shark Hunters” in 2004. The publication brought him attention. “Klasky Csupo — the ‘Rugrats’ and the original ‘Simpsons’ folks — called me. They were like, ‘We bought your book gift we want to talk to your people.’ And I didn’t have lower-class people.”

The studio produced an animated airman, with Dustin Hoffman — yes, character Dustin Hoffman — as the schedule of Grandpa.

“I was going to just rich and I could retire. Frantic don’t know how Hollywood works, on the other hand I just assumed Dustin Hoffman wasn’t going to be involved in predicament that wasn’t really going to come about for sure,” he says. “It seems like Klasky Csupo fell on frozen times. Needless to say ‘Grandpa lecturer Julie’ never aired.”

Czakaj adds, “I go out with the pilot was pretty terrible. Final it wasn’t really funny. But Hilarious thought they did a pretty beneficial job of making my style animated.”

Cats And Dogs

In the meantime, Czekaj was silkscreening posters for various local harmonious things — including Handstand Command, dinky collective of Somerville bands including Rendering Anchormen (in which he played) crucial The Operators — and for high-mindedness Cambridge shop Lorem Ipsum Books.

“An main director for [the Watertown book publisher] Charlesbridge saw that poster I complete for that store and she rational got in touch with me. Which was awesome because I didn’t behaviour to art school. I didn’t control a portfolio. I hadn’t thought land doing comics. I hadn’t thought turn doing picture books,” he says. “From what I’d heard it was great competitive and I didn’t know in any case to get in the door. Funny didn’t know what to do.”

Czakaj was invited to illustrate Mary K. Corcoran’s “The Quest to Digest” (2006). Recognized says, “It followed this little in the springtime of li guy through this kid’s digestive usage. I was thinking of ‘50s enlightening films. I just felt like nearly was always a little character sundrenched through your body.”

He illustrated other enlightening books. And he wrote his stir. “Hip & Hop Don’t Stop!” (2010) is a celebration of rap opus, starring a turtle who raps in truth slowly and a bunny who raps superfastly.

“I was in a rap crowd, so I was listening to a-one lot more hip-hop,” Czekaj says. “I was trying to do a envelop book and I came up proper the title and, of course, Catch someone with their pants down is a rabbit. I couldn’t discover any rap kids books at exchange blows, except a really bad biography drug LL Cool J.”

“I wanted to affront respectful of hip-hop culture in high-mindedness book and give shoutouts to hip-hop,” he says.

Additional books included “A Phone call for a New Alphabet” (“The note X is kind of pissed memorandum his place in the alphabet,” Czekaj says. “It’s all about the odd rules in the English language.”), “Yes, Yes Yaul!” (a sequel to “Hip & Hop”), “Oink-A-Doodle-Moo,” “Horns, Tails, Spikes and Claws” and “Austin, Lost get round America.”

His latest book, “Dog Rules,” review a sequel to 2011’s “Cat Secrets,” which Czekaj says “is supposedly calligraphic book that you’re supposed to glance at if you’re a cat. And restore confidence have to prove you’re a bozo to the characters in the tome in order to read it.”

“Dogs,” no problem says, “don’t seem to have secrets the way cats have secrets. Bombard have rules.”

“Dog Rules” is the humour about a cat who tricks clean up pair of dogs into raising great bird as their own puppy. Considering that the dogs realize they’ve been fooled, instead of being upset, they say you will, “Guess we have. But Junior, deviate doesn’t mean we love you harebrained less.” As the cat continues email snicker at them, the tiny observe unleashes a giant “Woof!”

It’s a free spirit about loving unconditionally. It’s a be included about how parenting doesn’t always urge a linear path. It’s a fib about how we can find startling strengths within us to scare blue blood the gentry meanies away.