BLOGS > JUNE 1, 2026
BY FOLLETT CONTENT
Award-winning author and illustrator Adam Rex is back with the fourth installment of the highly acclaimed early reader chapter book series, The Story of Gumluck and the Portrait Thief. The queen’s portrait has been stolen, but luckily, Gumluck’s crew is on the case! Join Adam in a playful question-and-answer where he speaks on his process, fan-favorite (and not-so-favorite) characters, and outfit choices, which is totally relevant.
I almost exclusively start with the words, but there’s a give-and-take as I go.
Sometimes writing is a lot of he-saids and she-saids, and it’s nice to break that up with an image and a word balloon. Or I realize a page turn to an unexpected picture will hit harder than a line of prose that reads, “Suddenly, they were surrounded.”
So maybe I never write that line, not even in the first draft, but rather indicate parenthetically that an illustration is going to step in. I like being able to think of illustrations as part of the toolkit that turns the nuts and bolts of the story, rather than as some extraneous embellishment waiting every 10 pages or so like a prize for progress.
When I’m making a story, first and foremost I need you to understand what’s happening. After understanding, I’m going to see if I can get you to feel something. If I really do my job, you’ll feel more than you understand. Prose blurs the line into poetry when it does that, but the right image can run 10 laps around your heart in the time it takes you to read a line of text.
Also, sometimes I just like to put in a funny picture of a pig’s bottom.
That’s an interesting question. If I bristle a little, it’s only because I don’t believe Helvetica ever lies. She’s sometimes wrong, but if you can show her she’s wrong, she admits it, which already makes her more reliable than half the people I meet.
Boy, I don’t know. I think I already do more to humanize him in this book than I ever expected to – the longer I spend with a character, any character, the more they turn into a person. I guess that’s how it tends to work with the characters you meet in real life, too, now that I think of it.
In The Story of Gumluck and the Portrait Thief, we do learn that Prince Whoop-de-doo is, in a sense, just a little boy who misses his mommy. But that doesn’t make him not a fink. He’s got a lot of work to do. If I ever get a book that I know ahead of time to be the last in the series, maybe I’ll put him through it.
I realized police officers have this problem, too! I decided to see if I could get an answer:
So no, I didn’t get an answer.
Thank you for your questions. Here’s a pig’s bottom.
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