“We’re launching Unruly because we believe that the possibilities for the illustrated book are larger and richer than the categories of board book, children’s picture book, graphic novel, and art book that currently exist,” says Enchanted Lion’s publisher, Claudia Bedrick. “It’s our contention that as human beings and readers, we never age out of picture books but rather yearn for and seek out visual narratives across our lives. Illustrated stories engage us in a complex and embodied way that is very different from how we engage with text alone.”
Picture books are rich with design and story possibility, and yet the genre is widely thought to be strictly for children. For Enchanted Lion, sparking awareness that picture books—where word and image live together as nowhere else—are for readers of all ages might finally allow the unique form to be seen as the expansive narrative medium it is.
Toward this end, in autumn 2020 Enchanted Lion announced Unruly, a new imprint dedicated to picture books created with older readers in mind.Genre-bending,difficult themes, philosophical ponderings, and poetry have been hallmarks of Enchanted Lion titles from the start, but these books were written as children’s literature—a great literature, perhaps even the greatest, but one that doesn’t capture the picture book’s full potential as a medium. Unruly titles will stand apart as visually complex works of fiction and nonfiction created for older readers (some for readers 10 and up, and others for teen and adult readers). By reframing the readership’s age, Unruly makes room for a more complex exploration of the relationship between text and image while also considering more mature topics.
The imprint’s first title,The Story of a Mouse Who Never Asked for It, which drops in June, is a feminist retelling of a Spanish folktale, written by Ana Cristina Herreros, illustrated by Violeta Lópiz (The Forest), and translated from the Spanish by Chloe Garcia Roberts (When You Look Up). This book catalyzed the creation of Unruly, as it was only once the text and illustrations were united that the full force of the story’s themes and implicit violence became apparent.
Following years of conversations about picture books being for readers of all ages, the publisher decided that the moment to take action had arrived. “Rather than refusing Lópiz’s work and other work like it,” Bedrick says, “we decided to create a space under Enchanted Lion for such innovative and uncontainable titles, which will push the form through a hybridization of picture book, graphic novel, artist’s journal, and art book conventions while never relinquishing narrative, however experimental.”
