I suppose if you were to market children's books, particularly picture books, your target audience is not the young reader with no $pending power, but the anxious parent and doting aunt who will be buying the book. So it was only natural that publishers and bookstores soon packaged these books, Silverstein's "The Giving Tree" for example, to the adult reader instead, "the young at heart". These books sit at the far borders of the graphic novel world, since their wisdom and moral universe are too saccharine.
At Kinokuniya's Christmas/New Year discounts, I picked up a couple of books by Taiwan writer/illustrator Jimmy/幾米 Ji Mi. Aiyah, being a snob, I had ignored his books for a long time...until after the recent trip to Taipei. Taiwan's been in love with his dreamy, colourful children's book illustrations for several years. But since Hong Kong made these poor movie adaptations out of his Turn Left, Turn Right and The Sound of Colours, he has outgrown that island.My favourite is this 2003 book Mr Wing (pic above is of a vinyl toy based on the book...Merchandise!). It's a meandering sort of narrative that starts with perfection and ends with... ambivalence. A guy with the perfect life (handsome, rich, talented, charming, good-natured) discovers one day that he has sprouted wings. And what seems the pinnacle of his achievements (a man so perfect he becomes an angel) quickly becomes first an irritation, then a curse to be overcome, and finally, a just a fact of a radically pared-down existence. He doesn't return to his perfect life. He doesn't get much out of it all. There's no moral to be derived and no lesson learnt. But the reader knows that he survives somehow.
posers in front of giant yoshitomo & JiMi illustrations
Maybe it's the desire for escape into a simpler world that nonetheless acknowledges the stresses of grown up life. Or maybe we all just like looking at pretty pictures...
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