The esteemed children’s book illustrator talks about his first novel

Your Web site says that you’re over eight feet tall, and you live in Philadelphia with an astrophysicist wife and two cats as big as buffalo. Is that completely factual?

I do have two cats. I do live in Philadelphia, and my wife is an astrophysicist, but that’s where it ends.

The True Meaning of Smekday is about space aliens who conquer our planet. It also features a friendship between a girl named Gratuity “Tip” Tucci and an extraterrestrial who calls himself J.Lo. What’s with those names?

Gratuity came to me because it sounded like one of those virtuous names like Constance. Her mom thought it meant somebody who was gracious or had gratitude and way later, after the birth, found out what gratuity really meant. It just hit me like a thunderbolt while I was driving one day. In the early days, I had named J.Lo Oprah. But I changed his name, because I thought J.Lo was funnier.

Since you’re a children’s book illustrator, did Smekday start out as a picture book?

I read John Marsden and Shaun Tan’s The Rabbits. It’s a picture book about imperialism, and that got me thinking about the subject. So what turned into Smekday was originally a picture book, which I then read aloud to my wife, and she justifiably said, “No.” It just wasn’t a picture book. So I put it away for a while and it wasn’t until much later that I kind of smacked my forehead and said, “Well, of course! I’ll try to make a novel out of it.”

Although the story has a lot of serious social commentary, its silly humor reminds me of a Farrelly brothers’ movie.

I think sometimes to my wife’s dismay, I’m still very susceptible to that kind of humor. She says that I have a younger-sibling mentality, where it’s all about poop jokes and needling the older sibling. She was an older sibling, so she sometimes feels like she married her little sister.

After conquering Earth, the aliens justify their actions by saying they did it for humankind’s own good. That sounds like our nation’s invasion of Iraq.

It was definitely on my mind as I was writing. I was thinking about earlier American history, as well. The story didn’t really coalesce until after 9/11. I had started toying around with it before then, writing it off and on for quite a while. It was only after 9/11 that a lot of the pieces just fell into place.

Were you fascinated by UFOs when you were growing up?

Probably not any more than the average kid. I saw Star Wars when I was four or five. So I was indoctrinated into science fiction at a pretty early age. The whole idea of using aliens struck me as a good way to point out that it’s easy to think that your actions are virtuous when you’re on top of the world. But if that was only what the book ended up being about, it could have been overly preachy and didactic. Luckily, it evolved into more of a Hope and Crosby road movie, but with spaceships.

Did the story surprise you in any way?

I didn’t expect to fall in love with the characters as much as I did. In a 32-page picture book, you don’t become as invested in the characters, unless you’re a poetic genius like Maurice Sendak. When I fell in love with the characters, the story went in some emotional directions that I hadn’t really expected. I set out to write a funny book with social commentary, and I ended up writing a human drama with humor and social commentary.

The book is wacky, but you’re actually a very serious guy, which—no offense—wasn’t what I expected.

That’s the second time I’ve been told that I was unexpectedly serious in an interview. I’m going to need to get a bicycle horn.