How Far Will a Rubber Band Stretch?

How Far Will a Rubber Band Stretch?
Mike Thaler ~ Jerry Joyner ~ Parents' Magazine Press, 1974

As promised yesterday, here's another lost classic illustrated by Jerry Joyner (and written by the man responsible for The Teacher from the Black Lagoon series). This one involving a boy and his unquenchable thirst for answers.

One day a little boy decided to find out how far a rubber band would stretch. So he put one end of the rubber band around his bedpost and walked out the door.

Lord, haven't we all done this as children? Attached a rubber band to something and pulled, with the inevitable pain of a snap-back looming all the way. Here, the boy takes it a bit further. First, getting on his bike, then catching a ride on a bus... a train... an airplane... a boat... a camel, until, at last, he ends up with his arm hanging out of a rocket ship. And when the loss of gravity on the moon makes him lose the upper hand, he's BOING-ED straight back to bed.

What I find most engaging is how when the book begins, Joyner is using a more loose, abstract style, and as the story goes on, the drawings become tighter and more realistic, thereby visually imitating a rubber band, I suppose.

I love it when artists add these sort of nuances. (I was blown away by this post by Ward Jenkins about Where the Wild Things Are and shocked that I never noticed the page progression Sendak created before.) Soooo cool.

Also by:
Thirteen

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