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Meg mog1/7/2024 Pieńkowski always brought flowers to put on the table Nicoll brought salmon. There, they nutted out the comic-strip layout, the ratio of words – approximately 10 – to each page, the eye-popping double spreads, and the fantastic use of negative space. He said yes, but on one condition: the witch’s spells mustn’t work.įor years they met in the cafe at Membury service station, equidistant between their homes on the M4. They met at the BBC in the early 1970s working on the TV show Watch! She wanted to write kids’ books and asked him to illustrate. The “violently colourful” stick-figure drawings are by the genius illustrator Jan Pieńkowski, and the stories by Helen Nicoll. The first Meg and Mog was published in 1972. For those not in the know, Meg is a stick figure witch with a broom, clumpy clogs, a stripey white-and-black cat called Mog – with yellow eyes and a twirly tail, his entire barrel body covered in bristles – and a pet Owl, white and circumspect. I took it home in a brown paper bag and read it to Fearne that night. Those funkadelic colour schemes! You can tell Meg and Mog originated in the 1970s, like me – that decade of bell bottoms, and Abigail’s Party, and hallucinogenic drugs. I felt a frisson of recognition and delight. I slid the lurid red spine out and knelt on the floor, leafing through the pages. When my daughter Fearne was nearly three, I found a copy of Meg’s Eggs in Pegasus Books. Recommended to young readers who enjoy witchy fare of a more humorous kind.Megan Dunn puts all her eggs in one basket with Meg and Mog. As always, the little exclamations and asides to be found in the speech bubbles - Owl's exasperated "He's eaten too much again," eyes rolled upward, when the fish skeletons are revealed in Mog's tummy - add to the sense of fun. Readers already familiar with the trio of Meg, Mog and Owl will know what to expect - i.e.: catastrophe - when Meg steps in to solve the problem with magic, and will not be disappointed. With plenty of humorous hi-jinks, and brightly colored illustrations that suit the characters' madcap antics to a T, Mog's Mumps is another enjoyable entry in Helen Nicoll and Jan Pieńkowski's witchy picture-book series. Unfortunately for Mog, his treat, once he is feeling better, lands him back in bed again until Christmas. Swallowing the potion she has concocted for him, he undergoes a series of colorful transformations, but it is only when an x-ray spell is cast - "Baked boiled grilled or fried / Show us what's in Mog's inside" - that the cause of the trouble is revealed. Mog the witch's cat encounters some difficulties in this eighth entry in the Meg and Mog series, finding himself seriously unwell and subject to Meg's magical care. In addition to the MEG AND MOG series, Helen has a long and varied association with Puffin - as editor of the Junior Puffin magazine THE EGG from 1977 - 1979, as compiler of the popular children's poetry anthology POEMS FOR SEVEN YEAR OLDS AND UNDER, illustrated by Michael Foreman, and through her partnership with Puffin, the enormously popular series of Puffin Cover to Cover story tapes of which Helen is the Producer. The result is the immensely popular MEG AND MOG series. After working together for four years, they decided it was time to preserve their creativity in book form for future generations of children to enjoy. It was here, as Producer of the children's educational series WATCH, that she first met Jan Pienkowski. Helen Nicoll was a television producer with the BBC for many years. Helen Nicoll married Robert Kime in 1970 and they have one daughter and one son. She was educated at schools in Bristol Dartington Hall, Devon and Froebel Education Institute, London. Helen Nicoll was born in Natland, Westmorland, in 1937.
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