Author-illustrator boasts plenty of drawing power

"What if?" and "What then?"

Chris Van Allsburg likes those questions. They spark his imagination, lead him in unexpected directions -- perhaps aboard a train headed for the North Pole or into a kindhearted widow's home, where a witch has left her aging broom. "I have these images in my mind, sometimes just fragments," says the author-illustrator of such celebrated picture books as The Polar Express and The Widow's Broom. "I begin to wonder, `What if two bored children discover a board game? What then?' " What if the game was magic and a jungle suddenly grew in the house? What if a rhino ran rampant and a lion appeared on top of the piano? What if a volcano spewed lava on the living room floor?

Why then you would have Van Allsburg's 1981 tale Jumanji, which won the prestigious Caldecott Medal and was made into the 1996 movie starring Robin Williams. With its blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy, the book is emblematic of Van Allsburg's wonderfully weird and often enigmatic works.
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The World of Chris Van Allsburg

Chris Van Allsburg