Luna calendar
Frank Viva’s charming picture book chronicles a boy’s birthday trip to Coney Island
NOW YOU CAN introduce your kids to Coney Island before setting foot in the summer playground.
A new picture book out Tuesday, “Outstanding in the Rain,” follows a little boy who spends his birthday on the famed Brooklyn boardwalk with his mom.
Illustrator and writer Frank Viva hasn’t been to Coney Island in more than 30 years, but that didn’t stop the Toronto-based artist from reimagining iconic area attractions.
“My memory is kind of hazy but kind of good,” Viva, 57, says of his own childhood trips to the beachfront amusement park, taken with his parents on visits to New York. “What I loved about Coney Island was the signage and the decay.”
Viva later returned once as a young adult, back in 1981, when he was a college student in New York. A friend took him drinking in the Meatpacking District and the pair stayed out all night. In the morning, they took the D train to the last stop and ended up at Coney Island.
“We arrived there in a kind of fog, and also there was a literally a fog,” Viva recalls.
He did ride the Cyclone, the historic wooden roller coaster that got stuck two weeks ago while packed with riders on opening day.
“The Cyclone was very jarring,” says Viva. “I remember my neck hurting when I got off."
A roller coaster that resembles the Cyclone is represented on the pages of the book, as well as a ride that looks like Deno’s Wonder Wheel, and versions of the cotton candy, Italian ice, skee-ball games, fortune teller booths and other vendors that line Luna Park.
There’s not a whole lot of plot in the book: the boy gets an ice cream cone and then (spoiler alert!) drops it on the ground. He and his mother go on some rides, have a picnic on the beach, and go on more rides till it rains and they catch the D train home.
The language in “Outstanding in the Rain” is as playful as the artwork, as Viva uses a grammatical device called the oronym — two phrases that are pronounced same but mean different things.
Even the book’s title, when spoken aloud, can mean something magnificent happened in the rain, or the act of standing outside and being rained on.
In the story, the little boy observes that, “Those sandwiches there, they look like the best,” and then points out, “On the sand which is there, we stop and we rest.”
The text is made all the more playful by holes literally cut out of the children’s book pages so that some of the same words appear on other pages in different sentences.
The cutouts also enhance the artwork: a group of balloons on one page becomes a 4-scoop ice cream cone on another.
Viva’s Coney Island book isn’t his only New York-themed artwork out this year. Millions of straphangers can also see his work posted in subway cars and buses as one of the MTA’s 2015 art cards — panels of original work commissioned by the MTA.
“We were familiar with Frank’s work and love the playfulness of it,” says Amy Hausmann, deputy director of MTA Arts & Design. “We thought it would read really well on the subway.”
Viva’s art card is titled “Sightseeing MTA” and is a rendering of the inside of a subway car in motion, with a diverse cast of characters not unlike those in “Outstanding in the Rain.” Outside each window in the illustration is a different scene, even depicting different times of day.
“I was playing with the idea of being on the subway train,” Viva says. “I love looking out the window. The scenes that get framed through the windows are constantly changing art.”
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Frank Viva will be in New York signing copies of “Outstanding in the Rain” April 25 at 1 p.m. at Books of Wonder (18 W. 18th St.); and April 26 at 11:30 a.m. at Powerhouse On 8th (1111 8th Ave., Brooklyn). Copies of his subway art card are available for purchase at the New York Transit Museum Store and online
at nytransitmuseumstore.com