Welcome to Kon Tan's Newsletter
;-)
Hi I’m Kon Tan, and thanks for subscribing to my Substack! I’m a kids book author and illustrator and my series WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE-NOSAUR! has been just been released into the world! If you haven’t bought it yet for your kid, niece, nephew, godchildren, or yourself, don’t worry, there’s still time, like lots of time really, but not too much… but let’s not go there, oh no, this newsletter is not of the doom and gloom variety but instead is meant to inspire!
Cause if a humble kid of immigrant parents, from a neighborhood like waaaaaay up in the Bronx, can publish a book under warm mouse furred embrace of Disney, maybe so can you! Be published that is, if that’s what you want (but lemme tell you, you have to REALLY want it!) Or maybe you want to find out how kids books are made, from the first excited inkling of an idea, to the utterly exhausted last perusal and sending of your formatted files? Or just maybe, you are here, like me sometimes, just utterly confused as to how you got here in the first place. ME TOO BUDDY, ME TOO. I have no idea what I’m doing have the time, but I do it with all of me. Like Coyote slamming into that painted wall of a horizon. And that’s the kind of cartoon inspired insight you’ll be getting from me.
Wait! Don’t unsubscribe yet! I have one more thing to share. The big one, the big question: Where do your ideas come from?? More specifically, where did this idea come from? And in this case— it’s a poem! Ooh, look at the artist here, thinking he’s all educated, gonna cite a POEM from WILLIAM SHAKES— nope! This one comes from the late great American poet Ogden Nash (1902-1971), who according to my very cursory google search (unaided by AI, thank you!) was considered the country’s most popular produced of humorous poetry. It was shared very often by my late great father Vladimir Steshenko (1941-2023) who loved a great turn of phrase and a dumb joke. There was no joke, story or poem he liked that he didn’t literally dozens of times and this one was imbedded into me like, well, a fossil imprints onto stone:
Fossils
At midnight in the museum hall, The fossils gathered for a ball. There were no drums or saxophones, But just the clatter of their bones, A rolling, rattling, carefree circus Of mammoth polkas and mazurkas. Pterodactyls and brontosauruses Sang ghostly prehistoric choruses. Amid the mastodonic wassail, I caught the eye of one small fossil. Cheer up, sad world, he said, and winked. It’s kind of fun to be extinct. - Ogden Nash
I always wanted to do a comic, a book, a something heavily featuring dinosaurs. And with this idea, it actually was born title first. ‘We’re All Gonna Dinosaur!’ is a title I came up with doodling between customers as a cashier at the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles and trying my hardest to come up with excited pitches for animated shows.
Pitch poster for a potentially animated ‘We’re All Gonna Dinosaur!’
But wait, you said the idea came from a poem! It did! And it also came from a series of illustrations I drew for the dorm rooms of my alma mater Johns Hopkins University when I was a resident advisor and had to come up with a theme for my floor of residents. And this is the way my ideas work, over the long process of time, over a lifetime really, as a kid listening and being touched, humored and frightened by my dad’s poem. As a 21 year old trying to make a fun design for a college dorm. As a 33 year old, bored out of his mind working retail, trying to draw up the biggest doorstopper to let himself into an industry he moved all the way to Los Angeles for. As a 44 year old, trying to break into the publishing industry after his attempts at animation stalled out.
Early Pterry designs for graphic novel series
The particular brainstorm that rained down WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE-NOSAUR! from the recesses of my unconscious mind, dredged up and drew together a literal lifetime of ideas, interests, and thoughts into a story that hopefully sits in your hands (and your kids) and gives you the same glee and joy as I had when writing and drawing it.
Thinking of how everything in life comes together, I like to imagine my dad out there somewhere in the universe, winking at us. ;-)