Which obviously suits the 2-to 7-year-old set just fine. So much so that Kirk's multilegged characters have been smash hits since his first tale, Miss Spider's Tea Party, climbed onto shelves in 1994. Read by Madonna (during a 1995 MTV special promoting her "Bedroom Stories" video) and by Hillary Rodham Clinton, who used the book to launch a 1997 literacy drive for children, Tea Party and its 1995 follow-up, Miss Spider's Wedding, have together sold more than a million copies. Now with a third book, Miss Spider's New Car (published last month), Kirk's protagonist has snared deals for a movie, home video and a CD-ROM. "Miss Spider is neat [and] independent," notes Steve Geek, who tracks kids' books for retail behemoth Barnes & Noble, of the gentle spider who befriends the insects who are scared of her. "She appeals to a whole new generation of kids."
Maybe that's because Kirk, a baby-faced 42-year-old who spent years in the toy business, never quite grew up. "My career is based on all the stuff I was interested in when I was 7," he says. The "stuff" includes not only entomology, but also a fantasy world where dayglow spiders sip tea with moths. True, a proper eight-legger wouldn't recognize Miss Spider's lemon-yellow torso. But her wide-eyed sweetness—inspired by Kirk's daughter Violet, now 11—gives her a childlike innocence as she navigates a world that is fantastic and frightening. "That's why kids respond to the stories," Kirk says. "There's plenty of fear in their lives too."
Not that Kirk's own childhood was all that fraught with fear. The younger of two sons born to Don, a retired insurance salesman, and Connie, a homemaker, David and brother Daniel (now 45 and also an artist and kids' book author) grew up in a corner of Columbus, Ohio, sufficiently leafy to accommodate a parade of snakes, praying mantises and moths. A budding artist, Kirk spent hours perfecting his drawings of robots. Graduating from Walnut Ridge High School in 1973, he went on to the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he met future wife Susan (married in 1980, the two are now divorcing) and also won a $2,500 scholarship to paint in England.
Back in the U.S. in 1978, Kirk and Susan moved to Manhattan, where she worked at a film-processing company while he made toys to sell in his own SoHo shop. Tired of New York's crowds by 1982, the Kirks put all their money into a crumbling house in Upstate New York. Kirk started a toy factory, hiring woodworkers to produce the toys he sold from the back of his Volvo to toy stores and New York City toy fairs.
That business was failing in 1992 when an editor from Rizzoli, an art-book publisher, became entranced with Kirk's colorful, imaginative toys and gave him a $5,000 advance to write and illustrate a children's book. Kirk managed to get out of that deal a few weeks later when Nicholas Callaway, another publisher, offered him $20,000 for the same book, and Kirk—who sometimes takes six weeks to complete an illustration—spent the next year creating the intricately detailed paintings for his first opus. "David's like Disney, Dr. Seuss and Jim Henson," says Callaway, who publishes the books in consort with Scholastic Inc. "He taps into children's minds."
Sharing his renovated house with Violet (who spends half the week with her mother, a designer of decorative boxes) and an array of pets helps keep the tap flowing. And with another Miss Spider book on the way and a Miss Spider movie script to cowrite, Kirk keeps his eyes on the creepy crawlies living in his house. As for his heroine, "Miss Spider," he says, "is just the lonely bug in everybody."
PETER AMES CARLIN
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- Contributors:
- Ron Arias.
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