This post was originally published on Picture Book Den, a blog about picture books by picture book authors and illustrators.
Two types of pictures that were guaranteed to hold my attention as a child were cross sections and cutaways. These revealing illustrations offered readers a god-like omniscience allowing them to peek at things that were usually hidden and imparting an understanding of how individual parts or spaces fitted together to form a more complex whole.
If you’re not clear on what the difference is, a cross section is a drawing which shows the view revealed by an imaginary straight line slice through an object, while a cutaway is a drawing in which some external parts have been removed (or ‘cut away’) to reveal the interior. Many of the drawings featured in “cross section” books are actually cutaways.
One illustrator who did a great deal to popularise cutaways was Leslie Ashwell Wood. Although perhaps best know for the hundreds of cutaways he created for the Eagle comic in the 1950s and 60s, Wood also produced a series of Inside Information books including this one featuring cutaways of space craft, which I spent many hours poring over as a child.
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| Inside Information on Space Travel was part of a series of twelve Inside Information cutaway books illustrated by Leslie Ashwell Wood |
There was a quite a craze for cross sections and cutaway books in the 1990s, perhaps most notably the Incredible Cross Section series illustrated by Stephen Biesty.
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| Stephen Biesty’s intricately detailed exploded cutaway through the Colosseum from Rome in Spectacular Cross-Section with text by Andrew Solway. |
While Biesty’s drawings revealed the hidden intricacies of the real world, past and present, other illustrators began to produce equally detailed cross sections and cutaways based on the fictional worlds of films and TV shows. In 1998 Dorling Kindersley published Star Wars: Incredible Cross-Sections, illustrated by Hans Jensen and Richard Chasemore and written by David West Reynolds.
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| Hans Jenssen’s Millennium Falcon cutaway from Star Wars: Incredible Cross-Sections. |
Since then everything from the Thunderbirds' rescue craft to Wallace and Gromit’s motorbike and sidecar has been laid bare in cutaway or cross section form.
An amusing variation on the genre is Alan Snow’s How Things Really Work series which purports to show the mechanical interior workings of familiar creatures.
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| A cross section though a Stegosaurus from Alan Snow’s How Dinosuars Really Work. |
Although some of the books featured above contain fictional content, none of them are story books, so I thought I’d finish off by looking at some picture books that incorporate cross-sections into a narrative.
Now that you know what a fan I am, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that cross sections and cutaways occasionally pop up in the picture books I've written, such as this wonderfully detailed crocodile-submarine gatefold that Steve Cox created for The Treasure of Captain Claw.
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| Captain Claw's crocodile-like submarine (click here to see a larger version). |
Chris Riddell’s cutaway drawing for Pirate Diary, written by Richard Platt, allows readers to explore the ship on which the story is set …
… as does this Noah’s Ark cross section (made from plasticine!) by Barbara Reid for her picture book Two By Two.
But no post about cross sections and cutaways in picture books would be complete without a mention of the two Full Moon books – Full Moon Soup and Full Moon Afloat – by Alistair Graham. These are both wordless picture books in which the story is told in a sequence of twelve comically detailed cross sections populated by a cast of increasingly weird and wonderful characters. In Full Moon Soup the eponymous magical potion results in a Fawlty-Towers-like hotel going from this at the start of the book …
… to this by the end.
I hope you've enjoyed this 'slice' of some of my favourite picture book cross sections and cutaways. If you have any favourites of your own, I’d love to hear about them in the comments box below.
The submarine cross section featured above is taken from
The Treasure of Captain Claw, illustrated by Steve Cox and published by Orchard Books.
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