You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hi, this is Mike Silverblblad and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Jules Pfeiffer, the cartoonist, best known, of course, for the strip that

began in the Village Voice in 1956.

But more recently, the author of his first children's book, The Man in the Sealing, published by Harper Collins in the Michael Decapula imprint.

I thought I'd begin by asking if it was fun to do a book where the grown-up, Jules Pfeiffer, has to imitate a young boy's early fumbling cartoon style.

That was the part that was most scary to me when I began the drawing.

The writing came first, and, well, I knew that this was going to come into it.

It was the last thing in the world I wanted to do because I was most afraid of failure.

I mean, that the drawing had to be absolutely right.

It couldn't be a parody and the writing of it had to be absolutely right.

It could not be fake kids or make fun of it.

It had to be right on the money, and I wasn't sure I could do it.

And my mother had saved everything.

I drew comic books when I was a kid, and my mother had saved quite a bit of them.

So I took out my old stuff.

I found it in the closet and took it out and just copied, and did it over and over and over until I felt I could do it without referring to the early stuff and started to have a wonderful time.

But it was a lot of fun, but the fun was preceded by terror.

Are you really still afraid of failure?

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