Is there another picture book character whose life is so easily wiped out over and over, who is made so reprehensible that society accepts the routine portrayal of guns and brandished axes in a children’s picture book?

The story of Little Red Riding Hood is most probably the world’s most retold tale (Beckett 2008 p1) and if that is so, the killing of the wolf is told many, many times over, in many cultures and languages.

So, just how does illustration handle the tricky subject of the killing of a wolf? How does story-telling make it possible to kill off, without reprieve, one of its main characters, and what is illustration’s role in the process?

Is there another picture book character whose life is so easily wiped out over and over, who is made so reprehensible that society accepts the routine portrayal of guns and brandished axes in a children’s picture book?

I want to explore how illustrative techniques create the meaning of meanness? How do the elements of an illustration act as signs, as elements of signs that signify meaning with the reader? I want to explore these processes from the position of an animal advocate and better understand my own cultural influences and maybe prejudices and be aware of how I might place my illustrated wolf.

So, then, to make, a big bad wolf, make him a shadow, or place him in the shadows and make him silent and exaggerate his size. A shadowy creature has no identity. He is only significant in context of the Red character, he is a threat, a danger, a fear, a thing to fear. Writer Midge Raymond, in the blog Zoomorphic, argues that giving animals identity can help save them, ‘in doing so, we often can’t help but develop an emotional attachment to these named creatures.’ (Raymond 2016). Raymond is referring to naming, she also cites Cecil the Lion and Jane Goodall’s naming instead of numbering her wild research chimpanzees. Of course, giving a character identity can lead to stereotyping and the worst of anthropomorphic representations.