Word: kirke
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...however, much of a career arc for a big businessman. Yet this month Kirk, 47, and his fictional creations, the zippy Miss Spider and her bug confederates, began an unprecedented assault on the nation's nurseries, closets and gardens. Kirk's works will become Target's first children's designer brand. And as with the store's popular home products designed by Michael Graves and Todd Oldham, Target will be heavily promoting the signature style of the creator of the merchandise. The aim is for Kirk to become the progenitor of a "children's lifestyle brand." Think Martha Stewart...
...snare so many buyers? The stories are gentle and told in rhyme ("'If I had friends like these,' she sighed,/ 'Who'd stay a while with me,/I'd sit them down on silken chairs/And serve them cakes and tea'"), but the illustrations are what seals the deal. Kirk, who majored in art at the Cleveland Institute of Art, paints Miss Spider's rotund little body and curlicue hair in bold, almost hallucinatory colors, with outsize eyes and eyelashes and her world in equally poppy hues--just garish and cutesy enough that children lap it up. And not only children...
...Kirk followed the Miss Spider series in 1999 with Nova's Ark, a considerably darker tale of a planet populated only by robots. Instead of painting pictures, he worked with a computer-graphics company to create the images. He also has board books about baby animals for even smaller children, from infants to preschoolers. So far, he's the author of 12 titles overall. Pretty good going considering that he became an author by default...
...been making one-of-a-kind handcrafted toys, selling about 200 or 300 pieces a year at $100 each," says Kirk. His collectors were mostly Peter Pan--like adults. (Toy Story director John Lasseter has several.) Kirk decided to try to get into mass production and formed a company, Hoobert Toys. This did not go so well, financially. A couple of publishers made inquiries about whether he would like to do a book, "but Nicholas was the only one who offered to pay in advance," Kirk says. Nicholas is Nicholas Callaway, a publisher and packager of luxe books on photography...
Callaway gave Kirk a $20,000 advance, and when Miss Spider was more or less ready for her public, he organized an auction among 15 children's publishers for the book. Only Scholastic bid. Tea Party jumped to the best-seller lists within a month of publication...