If you follow the work of Matthew Cordell, you know he loves to sketch in ink. But what if that ink came from a multi-colored scented ballpoint pen? And what if the illustrations that came out of it formed an unexpected and heartwarming adventure that played with space and time? 102 is a special book, and I’m glad I got to talk to Matthew to learn more:
Me: Congratulations on your enchanting new picture book, 102 (Little, Brown and Company, April 2026)! It’s surrealism and number-play harken all the way back to Alice, but it also has touching themes about caring for animals and each other. What inspired you to create this book?
Matthew: Thanks, Jonathan! The earliest point of inspiration came from a simple event back in 2019 when a frog became trapped in one of the window wells of our basement. My 6-year-old son (at the time) and I came up with a plan to rescue the frog together with a rope, a broom, and a bucket on a rope. In the end, the frog was rescued and lived to see another day! That sweet little father/son adventure was the first little spark that inspired me to write some sort of animal capture and rescue story. Bit by bit, the story expanded and stretched out into far more than that, and often times, that’s how these things work.
Me: From what I’ve read (I like weird statistics) a ballpoint pen can write for 1 to 2, maybe more, continuous miles. You used 16 pens, which means that your own journey in this book was very long! For those of us who are mainly coloring digitally these days, what was the physicality like of drawing the many miles of this book?
Matthew: I’ve actually never heard that! Very interesting! I did use a multi-colored ballpoint pen to make the drawings in 102. It was a slow, tedious, layered approach where I would draw everything in one color—always the lightest, which would be yellow or light blue—then layer more lines over that, then layer more lines over that. It was sort of like mixing paints, but it was mixing colors of lines from the pen. These pens, which are often marketed for kids, I found in my own kids art supply stash. After playing around with them in my sketchbook, I had fun drawing with them in this way, and it ended up becoming how I wanted to draw my next book. The end result of this type of drawing, sort of radiates and vibrates with all the layers of colors, which works well with this unusual, topsy-turvy story.
Me: Both books – and art supplies – can have intoxicating scents (yes, I’m a book smeller, and I also love my Blackwings for their cedar aroma). So here’s an odd question: given the miles of overlapping, scented ink, what does the final art of 102 – or your studio – smell like?
Matthew: Because these inks in these pens were scented like candy—did I mention they are marketed for kids?—this was the first overtly scented artwork I’ve ever created. Smells of cotton candy, bubble gum, chocolate, licorice, and more would waft up from my drawing table as I was making these pictures! It only added to the very surreal reality of the whole thing. Unfortunately the smell does not last for too long—maybe a day tops—so the finished drawings today don’t have much of a smell at all. It was fun while it lasted!
Me: You give fun nods (and beans) to Miyazaki (I spy Totoro), Lobel (Frog and Toad), Jules Feiffer, and many more. Do you see this book as a homage to your inspirations?
Matthew: In a lot of my books, I try to hide fun little Easter Egg-y type things for kids to find. It’s always fun to hear from a young reader that they’ve found something in one of the pictures in a book. But with 102, I did a lot of that. I hid the number 102 in a handful of pictures (my original intention was to hide the number 102 times, but I couldn’t quite get there). But there was lots of opportunities to plant names and images of favorite artists throughout the book. Like with a poster on a wall, or some other background image like that. I also wanted to draw 102 beans for the art on the endsheets (102 bean soup is a plot point in the book), and because there are nowhere near that many different kinds of beans in the world, I had to come up with some fun names. I used a lot of art heroes, family members, my Little, Brown collaborators (editor and book designer), etc. While I was drawing this book, I was watching all of the Studio Ghibli films in order of release, so there’s lots of Ghibli artist and character nods, for any other Ghibli fanatics out there.
Me: Can you share your upcoming releases or what you’re working on next?
Matthew: Next up for me is Starman : The Cosmic Voyage of David Bowie, a picture book biography about one of my biggest artistic inspirations, David Bowie. Because Bowie was not at all a straightforward person, my biography of him is fittingly unorthodox too. He’s depicted as a space traveler (a Little Prince type figure) who searches the cosmos for artistic inspiration. He stops briefly at one planet after another, finding inspiration and creating new art from his discoveries. Then he moves on to try something and someplace new. Also like Bowie, I had fun trying out some different art styles for each different planet and sound he discovered. I’m excited for that one to come out in September.
Me: Wow, that’s sounds great. Looking forward to it! Thank you so much for chatting, Matthew. Wishing 102 much success!
To learn more, please go to Matthew Cordell.
