Mention should also be made of my award-winning children’s book, The Little Blue Brontosaurus.

Byron Preiss and I co-wrote the book, I designed all of the characters, painted and lettered the cover and did a handful of original illustrations before handing my layouts over to Pogo artist Don Morgan.

The book won the Children’s Choice Award for 1984.

Caedmon Records was the publisher of the book. They also released the book as an LP and cassette, both of which included a Little Blue poster.

Caedmon was a spoken word record company — and that was the problem. This was their first book — and they didn’t know how to sell it. Every store that carried the book promptly sold out of the book. Yet Caedmon wasn’t there to follow-up with more orders. I also noticed just how difficult it was to get copies for myself, so their marketing and distribution departments appeared to be filled with useless individuals.

I felt that Byron and I had a terrific intellectual property. I pressured him to begin the second Little Blue volume. Plus, I wanted to create a Little Blue coloring and activity book. He dragged his feet for what seemed like forever. I finally gave up and wrote the sequel myself. I titled it Little Blue’s Big Race.

This was the cover I designed for the book. Instead of saying “Thank you” for moving this project along, Byron became upset that I had written the sequel without his input. I told him to edit and contribute to what I had written. I was happy to share the writing credit.
There was no more communication on the sequel project for several months. I instructed Byron to return my original. It’s known among artists and writers that worked with Byron that he was cheap. He countered his cheapness by offering artists and writers dream projects to work on. He underpaid his employees, so he didn’t always necessarily get the brightest bulbs from the box.
Byron had one of his interns take care of shipping my Little Blue’s Big Race original painting back to me. The idiot packaged my art between two sheets of cardboard — no bubble wrap or extra padding — and shipped it off. The original arrived with huge gouges in the packaging. The art was folded in two, ruining the carefully airbrushed gradation of the background. There were rips through some of the characters. Until this happened, I had a buyer for the original art.
Fortunately the piece was insured — but I would have preferred to receive the picture in good condition instead of getting the insurance money.