ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Calvin and Hobbes. Fern and Wilbur. The kid section of the library is full of stories about children and their animal friends. Artist and illustrator Maxwell Eaton hopes to add his own set of friends to the bookshelf. He has created a series of books about the adventures of Max and his pig, Pinky. Here's North Country Public Radio's Brian Mann.
BRIAN MANN: It's a frigid December afternoon, and Maxwell Eaton is sitting at a table in his apartment in the tiny village of Saranac Lake, New York. Sketch(ph) by sketch, he forms the image of a grinning little boy.
MAXWELL EATON: Max's head is the hardest part for me. I got to get that perfect circle.
MANN: Eaton is in his mid-20s. He has black, curly hair, and he draws with his left hand, scrunched like a kid doodling at a desk. A couple of years ago, he was working as a ski bum in Colorado after graduating from the arts program at St. Lawrence University.
EATON: Some of my drawings are really dark and charcoal and mechanical things.
MANN: But sitting around the ski lodge, Maxwell Eaton found himself sketching cartoons on bar napkins.
EATON: Kind of out of boredom almost, I was just doodling and I came up with this character that I was just kind of drawing all the time. And finally, it became Max.
MANN: Max the character looks nothing like Maxwell the artist. With his bright red shirt and blue plants, the little boy is sort of like a happier, better- adjusted version of Charlie Brown. His sidekick who also evolved over thousands of doodles is a slightly subversive, marshmallow-obsessed pig named Pinky.
EATON: And he had the pig to say something or think something and show a little sarcasm, almost, in observing these ridiculous things Max was doing. And - but then it's just Max and Pinky.
MANN: On a whim, Eaton mailed his drawings to a New York City agent who liked them a lot; he then found an editor at Knopf who liked them even more. The first Max and Pinky book called "Best Buds" was published in 2006.
EATON: Max and Pinky love adventure. They go here, and we had them out camping at night. And Max is looking around in the tent and he says, hey, where did the marshmallows go? And we got Pinky out front with all the marshmallows.
MANN: Elizabeth Bluemle is a children's book author who has a particular fondness for Pinky.
ELIZABETH BLUEMLE: How cute is that pig? And It's a flying one. I just love that.
MANN: Bluemle owns a bookstore for kids in Shelburne, Vermont called The Flying Pig. She says kids love reading about characters who stick together even when times are tough.
BLUEMLE: The friendship between Pinky and Max is just so sweet and hilarious. They're a little bit like, you know, those George and Martha stories of friendship. It has that, I don't know, you know, that smiling feel to them, if you know what I mean by that.
MANN: Eaton says the texture of Max and Pinky's friendship grew out of his love for newspaper comics.
EATON: I like to think of it as kind of the Calvin and Hobbes generation. When I grew up in first grade starting to read Calvin and Hobbes, that was a big part of my childhood, I think, and that's where I get a lot of the timing and just the give-and-take between two very different characters.
MANN: In their finished form, Eaton's sketches are illuminated with the kind of bright, simple colors that you see in Sunday morning comics. Easton says he's been incredibly lucky finding an audience for his books, which are aimed at kids age 5 to 7. He also had to overcome one really inconvenient fact: He is colorblind.
EATON: It was an interesting jump into children's books and what turned out to be very bright illustrations and colorful in everything. In college, I focused mostly on print-making and drawing.
MANN: That's really when charcoal came in.
EATON: Yeah, exactly. So I kind of shied away from painting and everything.
MANN: With the help of a computer, and an art director at Knopf, Eaton finally found just the right palette for Max and Pinky's adventures.
EATON: They went out fishing. I don't even like worms, this fish says to Pinky. Pinky says, have you tried marshmallows? He's always got that on his mind, it seems - marshmallows and Max.
MANN: For NPR News, I'm Brian Mann in Saranac Lake, New York.