David Remnick: Liana Finck is a cartoonist who contributes to The New Yorker. She's also the author of the graphic memoir Passing for Human and other books. Her work has a quality of being somehow whimsical and at the same time, kind of profound. Like many of her great forebearers at the magazine, she's also done children's books. Earlier this year, Liana published a book called Mixed Feelings that explores, well, just that. The ways that our emotions sometimes confuse us, and that's something that happens if you're 4 or you're 64. I asked Liana Finck to join me and talk about some of the illustrators who have inspired her over time. Liana, you've been contributing amazing work, amazing cartoons to the magazine for a decade now, which seems hard to believe, and you've published children's books of your own. What's the overlap between cartoons for adults and children's books, if any?

Liana Finck: I think the children's book, as we know it, was invented by an editor at Harper & Row named Ursula Nordstrom. She published E.B. White. These books just get to the heart of things. I would compare them to fairy tales. They're--

David Remnick: Right. Children's books are very often like fables-

Liana Finck: Yes, fables.

David Remnick: -I think. We could say that that's the root of children's books is Aesop's Fables, or things like that. They had a moral lesson. Is that still the case in books that you're reading with your kids?

Liana Finck: More so, yes. I would say more lesson. We're a lot savvier about psychology now, so in some ways the books are a lot more sophisticated, and in other ways they're less weird, and that's a little bit sad.

David Remnick: I think maybe the first Pat the Bunny and Goodnight Moon is the book I think I've read most in my life.

Liana Finck: Yes, it's perfect.

David Remnick: I think it's possible that I've read that thousands of times to various kids of mine. How has becoming a mother changed your relationship to what you think makes a good kids' book?

Liana Finck: It has brought me back to the root of why I love art. Kids' books were my first experience of art. They're really why I do what I do. I loved them. I think I stopped loving them when it stopped being socially appropriate. It's weird when you're a drawing person to stop looking at kids' books because that's one of the real venues for people to draw stories. That's what I do. It's really different from fine art and painting, and sculpture and stuff. It's given me an excuse to get back to basics. I'm also watching my kid and watching what he likes. I'm realizing it's so much simpler than what I try to do as an artist. I'm always trying to go for the real reach.

David Remnick: Walk us through your selections. My understanding is that your first is by William Steig, who I even knew a little bit when I started as editor. Tell me about the William Steig book that you brought.

Liana Finck: I think it's one of the first ones he published. It's also a deep cut. I was really debating bringing Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, which is probably the first William Steig book I would recommend, but I'm assuming you've all read it. I brought one called CDB, that's a little bit for kids and a little bit for grownups. It's a book written in puzzles where each word is represented by a letter. He only says things that can be written just as letters. The phrase see the bee is written as the letters C, D, and B. Then he illustrates them with these anarchic, super emotional, super simple drawings that are not a reach.

He always stayed true to the most direct kind of drawing. I think that's why he made such a good kids' book author, which is something he became long after he'd been making cartoons for decades.

David Remnick: Those came much later.

Liana Finck: Yes, he was in his late '50s, I think, when he started doing these storybooks. There's another puzzle in the book. It's I envy you. It's spelled I, the letter N, dash the letter V, the letter U. It's a picture of a plaintive-looking boy talking to a much more confident, slightly older-looking boy who is eating a lollipop. One nice thing about this book and Steig's work in general is that he doesn't talk down to children. He uses big words. He talks about complex things. Envy probably isn't a word you would normally see in a children's book. He's boiling it down to make it so simple and so essential and to be something a child could absolutely relate to.

David Remnick: Next up is another Alphabet-based book, and this one is by another artist that I adore and who's published quite a lot in The New Yorker, Maira Kalman. Tell me about this book.

Liana Finck: This is called What Pete Ate From A to Z. It's autobiographical in that it's about a dog named Pete, who is Maira Kalman's dog. I brought this book because I think Maira Kalman might be my favorite kids' book author and illustrator. The first book that I read when I was four, when I thought like this is my favorite thing in the world, and I want to do this was another book by her called Sayonara Mrs. Kackleman. I think it had come out that year. It was new and it's so punk rock and it's so wild.

David Remnick: Now, you know or knew Maira Kalman. You were an intern for her.

Liana Finck: Yes. I wrote both her and Roz Chast letters when I was 16, or I think I wrote to Roz first. That began the most meaningful correspondence in my life. I wrote to Maira a little bit later, and she let me come be her intern.

David Remnick: What does an intern for an artist do?

Liana Finck: She had me organize her moss collection and walk Pete.

David Remnick: Now, here's one that's been around for a while. Tell me, Mitzi. What do you love about this?

Liana Finck: Tell me a Mitzi. The motif in this book is that there's a little girl named Martha living in then modern times. She says to her parents, "Tell me a Mitzi." Then they tell her a story about a little girl named Mitzi who's growing up, I want to say, in the '40s or '50s.

David Remnick: This is a collaboration between?

Liana Finck: Lore Segal wrote it, and Harriet Pincus illustrated it. Lore Segal, everyone needs to know as a writer writer. She was a child of the Holocaust, born in Vienna, I think.

David Remnick: Lore Segal wrote for The New Yorker pretty frequently and died within the last year or so.

Liana Finck: A year ago in October. Yes. Here's a little bit from the first story in Tell Me a Mitzi that I really like. The doorman helped Mitzi take the stroller down the steps, and Mitzi pushed Jacob to the corner of the street and called, "Taxi." A taxi stopped, and the driver got out and came around to their side. He lifted Jacob out of the stroller and put him in the back seat, and lifted Mitzi in and folded up the stroller and put it in the empty front seat and walked around to his side and got in and said, "Where to?" "Grandma and Grandpa's house, please," said Mitzi.

"Where do they live?"Asked the driver. "I don't know," said Mitzi. The driver got out and came around to the other side and took the stroller from the front seat, and unfolded it on the sidewalk and took Jacob out and put him in the stroller, and took Mitzi out and put her on the sidewalk and walked around to his side and got in, and drove away. On the first page, the words are next to a full page image of Mitzi walking out of her building, and she's pushing this stroller and she's passing all these kids playing on the street, and she's wearing this iconic snowsuit with purple with orange stars on it that I remember so well from when I was a kid.

Everything's just so like a little cabbage batch doll ugly, and also just so appealing and so delicious. I think Lore Segal is really wise. She was a mother, and I think she knew that words are just comforting to kids. I think she intentionally made this story a little bit tedious. There's a ton of tedious detail, and I think it's really soothing for kids. I still love these pictures a lot. As an adult, the things I love in these illustrations are the same things I loved as a kid. That's so interesting. I think when we look at pictures, it brings us back to exactly who we were when we were kids, which is magic.

David Remnick: Do you think cartoons, which began in satirical magazines and probably on cave walls, will last forever? Or was it a form that's challenged by the winnowing of magazines and the gigantic growth of the Internet?

Liana Finck: It's going to last forever, even if we're doing it secretly. I think it goes so deep. It's interesting. People in the inspirational moment that we were in recently, maybe still are, I don't know, people would be like, "Why should everyone draw?" That's a question I would get asked. I'd be like, "Not everyone should draw. That's ridiculous." Everyone's different. I should draw, but I'm changing my mind. I think it's so essential. I think it's very similar to music. It's just something that comes out of us.

David Remnick: Liana Finck, thank you so much.

Liana Finck: Thanks for having me.

David Remnick: Liana Finck's illustrated books include Mixed Feelings and Questions Without Answers. You can find some of her cartoons at newyorker.com, and you can subscribe to The New Yorker there as well. Newyorker.com.

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