This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Leanna Fink is a cartoonist who contributes to The New Yorker.

She's also the author of the graphic memoir, Passing for Human, and other books. Her work has a quality of being somehow whimsical and at the same time, kind of profound. And like many of her great forbearers at the magazine, she's also done children's books. Earlier this year, Leanna published a book called Mixed Feelings

that explores, well, just that.

The ways that our emotions sometimes confuse us,

and that's something that happens if you're four or you're 64.

I asked Leanna Fink to join me

and talk about some of the illustrators

who have inspired her over time.

Leanna, you've been contributing amazing work,

amazing cartoons to the magazine for a decade now,

which seems hard to believe,

and you've published children's books of your own.

What's the overlap between cartoons for adults and children's books, if any?

I think the children's book, as we know it, was kind of invented by an editor at Harper & Row named Ursula Nordstrom.

She published E.B. White. These books just kind of like get to the heart of things, I would compare them to fairy tales.

Right. Children's books are very often like fables. I think we could say that that's the root of children's books is Asap's fables or things like that they had a moral lesson. Is that still the case in books that you're reading with your kids?

More so. Yeah. I would say more lesson and we're a lot savvier about, like, psychology now.

So in some ways, the books are a lot more sophisticated, and in other ways they're less weird, and that's a little bit sad.

I think maybe the first Pat the Bunny and Goodnight Moon is the book I think I've read most in my life.

Yeah, it's perfect.

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