John Martz

Hey look, it’s me! Starring in Backwards Day, the iPad kids’ book I illustrated for JibJab Jr. The book is now live in the app store, and I couldn’t be happier with it how it turned out. JibJab has corralled a team of great illustrators to put out a book a month, all of which can be personalized to make your child the star of the book.

Too many apps published under the guise of “kids’ books” are so full of interactive things to touch and figure out and play with that they’re more like games than books. All of that extra junk gets in the way of what books are for, which is reading. JibJab Jr. books have a single interactive element: turning the page. So I am proud to be part of a series of iPad books that are books first, and apps second.

The books are penned by the amazing rhymester Scott Emmons.

Here’s a little sneak preview of how the book looks. Forgive the wonky video. I took it on my phone and used YouTube’s motion stabilizing feature which created some weird ghosting at the beginning:

Cross-posted from Picture Book Report.

…he also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any of a million ‘pages’ could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words Don’t Panic printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact the most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.

With this illustration, I travel backwards in the book again to Arthur’s introduction of the book within the book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s difficult to imagine this once-fantastical device without thinking of iPads, iPhones, Kindles, and Wikipedia. And it’s unfortunate that Douglas Adams, a Mac-user and tech nerd, never got to see his vision realized of a handheld device with instant access to endless sources of information.

In the book, the device is described has having “about a hundred” tiny buttons, though were it written today, the Guide would surely have a touchscreen. Still, I couldn’t resist making it look like a calculator (and very much like a Kindle) if only to decorate the buttons with an alien alphabet.

I used the same palette as my first illustration in the series, so those who wish to buy prints might find the two make a decent diptych.

This will be my last illustration for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In creating the series I realized that I didn’t want to illustrate the characters. It’s a book about ideas — science, reason, philosophy, religion — and the characters exist only as vessels for these ideas. I feel I’ve exhausted this stylistic exploration of the book, and so next month I will begin a new series for a different book. Stay tuned.

And if you’re an iPad user, I’ve created iPad-friendly wallpaper of this illustration that works in both landscape and horizontal orientation.

I took a cue from What Things Do, and reformatted the online edition of Heaven All Day so that the only navigation is scrolling. No more inefficient click-for-next-page business.

Looks great on the iPad, FYI.

In honour of June 16th, Captain Picard Day, here is a quick little Jean-Luc iPad doodle.