It seems only right that the review for the picture book finalists for NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults should be illustrated! We asked accomplished comic artist Tara Black to review all five finalists. Here, in pictures, are…
Amy Haarhoff won the 2019 Storylines Gavin Bishop Award, and The Midnight Adventures of Ruru and Kiwi was published in April 2020. Her illustration hero is Quentin Blake, and thinks his collaboration with Roald Dahl ‘was probably one of the…
Giselle has visited the theme of anthropomorphism in her comics in the past—remember birds with arms?—but recently she has been pondering the scale of it all. Why is it that sometimes dogs are dogs, and sometimes bears are…well… lets find…
Hannah Benbow is the comics and cartoons librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington – and she draws on that expertise in this essay looking into the early days of comics in the ‘children’s pages’ of Aotearoa newspapers of…
Today is editor Sarah’s birthday, and she’s going to shelter in one of her favourite books. Would you join her in Carrie Hepple’s Garden? Or perhaps up the cherry tree? Or if you are missing your friends, perhaps you’d join…
Today is apparently the day for romance, and what can be more romantic than working on a picture book together? Giselle Clarkson explores some stories behind the power couples of children’s publishing in her twenty-sixth comic for The Sapling. Happy…
The editors of The Sapling all love a good kids’ Christmas book. This comic celebrates the books that Briar, Thalia, Kura, and Sarah have enjoyed in the past. We hope you all have a wonderful holiday! Meri Kihiramete!
We love comics, and we love the artists behind them! So for this month’s Giselle Clarkson comic, we have something a little different for you: an illustrated interview! Sarah Laing – author/artist/designer extraordinaire – has a new book out with…
Giselle Clarkson wrestles with imposter syndrome in her most recent comic. Giselle has also illustrated The Gobbledegook Book, written by Joy Cowley, which will be released in September through Gecko Press. Head along to the launch on 14 September in…
Penguins have appeared in famed picture books with relative frequency over the years – and not just because a fair few books happen to have been created by a publishing house that shares their Antarctic avian name. But our intrepid…