But, boys dressed as cowboys and boys running away are common themes and who knows if anyone was influenced by anyone else. It is only the running away cowboy-dressed boys that are similar (and the Mercer Mayer design was probably Kathryn Hitte’s idea). Hitte/Mayer’s boy meets real-life characters.
Sendak’s boy meets a bunch of talking animals that are also running away. The two boy’s “adventures” while running away are very different. It only makes sense for them to take influences from their own lives.īoth feature boys in very different looking cowboy hats and boots running away one is a dark-haired boy who is “mad” because he got in trouble and had to sit quietly in the corner ( Boy, Was I Mad!), and the other is a light-haired boy who is “upset” because of a new sibling and not being listened to ( Very Far Away). Fitzgerald, Outside My Window (Liesel Moak Skorpen), Margaret’s Birthday (Jan Wahl), Grandmother Told Me (Jan Wahl), Boy Was I Mad (Kathryn Hitte), The Boy Who Made a Million (Sidney Offit), etc… BUT Maurice Sendak and Mercer Mayer are both men, and they were dark-haired boys once.
Mercer Mayer’s “boy”-character probably started with the unnamed boy in A Boy, a Dog and a Frog book and developed into many other similar looking/feeling boys in Terrible Troll, There's a Nightmare in My Closet, I am a Hunter, A Special Trick, Bubble Bubble, You’re the Scaredy Cat, etc (and also with slightly different color hair or glasses in If I Had…, Mine, A Silly Story, and others)… plus some of his illustrations for other authors like in The Great Brain series by John D. For Maurice Sendak, this is probably his “Pierre” archetype (which may have started in some of his early illustrations for Ruth Krauss books like A Hole is to Dig). They both have dark-haired boys that they’ve used for their characters. Secondly, they do both have a couple of “boy”-style characters that appear in a lot of their works.
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