Toy Boy

By Belinda Luscombe

For a children's-book author, David Kirk has a gilt-edged resume: son of puppeteers from Ohio; onetime toymaker; lives in a home in the woods full of small model robots and often works from his two-story Victorian-style tree house; has two daughters, Violet and Primrose, and another, Wisteria, on the way.

It's not, however, much of a career arc for a big businessman. Yet this month Kirk, 47, and his fictional creations, the zippy Miss Spider and her bug confederates, began an unprecedented assault on the nation's nurseries, closets and gardens. Kirk's works will become Target's first children's designer brand. And as with the store's popular home products designed by Michael Graves and Todd Oldham, Target will be heavily promoting the signature style of the creator of the merchandise. The aim is for Kirk to become the progenitor of a "children's lifestyle brand." Think Martha Stewart for toddlers.

Miss Spider, in case you're unfamiliar with her charms, is a strictly flower-eating arachnid. When we first met her in 1994, in Miss Spider's Tea Party, she was having trouble making friends with other bugs because they feared being consumed. But her kindness--and vegetarianism--won the day, and in subsequent books she has married, bought a new car and gone to school.

More than 4 million Miss Spider books are in print, making the series as big a seller as Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. How did she snare so many buyers? The stories are gentle and told in rhyme ("'If I had friends like these,' she sighed,/ 'Who'd stay a while with me,/I'd sit them down on silken chairs/And serve them cakes and tea'"), but the illustrations are what seals the deal. Kirk, who majored in art at the Cleveland Institute of Art, paints Miss Spider's rotund little body and curlicue hair in bold, almost hallucinatory colors, with outsize eyes and eyelashes and her world in equally poppy hues--just garish and cutesy enough that children lap it up. And not only children. Miss Spider moved from moderately well known fictional character to pop-cultural boldface name when Madonna read Tea Party at a nightclub event that was broadcast live on MTV in 1995. Suddenly the divine Miss S. was a favorite of college kids and found a gay audience too.

Kirk followed the Miss Spider series in 1999 with Nova's Ark, a considerably darker tale of a planet populated only by robots. Instead of painting pictures, he worked with a computer-graphics company to create the images. He also has board books about baby animals for even smaller children, from infants to preschoolers. So far, he's the author of 12 titles overall. Pretty good going considering that he became an author by default.

"I had been making one-of-a-kind handcrafted toys, selling about 200 or 300 pieces a year at $100 each," says Kirk. His collectors were mostly Peter Pan--like adults. (Toy Story director John Lasseter has several.) Kirk decided to try to get into mass production and formed a company, Hoobert Toys. This did not go so well, financially. A couple of publishers made inquiries about whether he would like to do a book, "but Nicholas was the only one who offered to pay in advance," Kirk says. Nicholas is Nicholas Callaway, a publisher and packager of luxe books on photography, design and fashion, including Madonna's notorious Sex book (which explains why the popstress had a copy of Tea Party handy for her MTV gig). Children's books were a departure for him, but something told him he could sell Kirk's work.

Callaway gave Kirk a $20,000 advance, and when Miss Spider was more or less ready for her public, he organized an auction among 15 children's publishers for the book. Only Scholastic bid. Tea Party jumped to the best-seller lists within a month of publication.

The children's-book business is a strange realm: whereas it's rare to sell millions of copies in a year (the anomaly of Harry Potter aside), the books tend to have an enduring shelf life. What other product created in the 1940s still sells well, almost completely unaltered? Goodnight Moon, Pat the Bunny and The Poky Little Puppy, sexagenarians nearly all; each still moves more than 150,000 hardbacks just about every year. And let's not even start on Dr. Seuss or P.D. Eastman. (Well, we can start: Green Eggs and Ham sold more than 500,000 copies in 2001, 41 years after it was published.)

Target and Kirk, however, are trying to take a reasonably successful franchise to a whole new level. Children's-merchandise aisles are dominated by characters from television and movies. It's rare that a character known through books alone can win the instant toddler recognition that drives many kids' purchases. And while Kirk's books have been big sellers, he has not had the runaway success of Ian Falconer's spunky little pig Olivia or President Bush's personal favorite, Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Still, neither Falconer's nor Carle's works are being spun into anything nearly so ambitious as the Sunny Patch brand, Miss Spider's line of goods. Target, Callaway and Kirk think that doesn't matter. "Our core guest [i.e., customer] is a busy mom with young children. She's highly educated," says Sally Mueller, Target's director of marketing planning. "Many of our core guests have read David Kirk's books, so we thought it was a logical connection." In other words, why should TV have all the spoils? "We believe, naively or otherwise," says Callaway, "that books are capable of creating the deepest of real emotional connections with the audience. It's what has determined our whole strategy: every product tells a story."

Target has taken an eccentric toymaker's vision and turned it into a product line. While Kirk says he and an assistant have done "thousands and thousands" of drawings for possible products, Target is manufacturing and delivering merchandise in just three areas: clothes, furniture and gardening appliances. Of these, the gardening tools (including watering cans, stepping stones, sprinklers and kneepads) look the most irresistible, perhaps because they constitute the least exploited category.

It might help things along that a Miss Spider TV special will run on Nickelodeon at the end of March and that Callaway and Kirk are also developing a TV series based on both Miss Spider and Nova the robot. On the other hand, the territory they're entering is not unpopulated. Rolie Polie Olie, a geometric tyke who lives on a robotic planet and who, like Nova, is a computer-generated image, is already on the Disney Channel, and his catchy theme song is lodged in the junior set's hearts. (Callaway doesn't see it as a threat, in part because Miss Spider's eyes are bigger: "That's the lesson Walt Disney taught us--big eyes.")

As for Kirk, he's happy to have come full circle, to be back making something again. And he isn't worried that grownup marketing concerns will make it difficult for him to summon his inner boy. "For me, it's more of an effort getting out of the place where I think like a child," he says. Financial maturity has its upside too: more pocket money to blow on robots, other toys and old woodworking tools on eBay. Not to mention the freedom to create more fantasy worlds. After all, what's the fun in growing up if you can't play with your toys whenever you want?