My friend Wendelin van Draanen just won a well-deserved award for her Young Adult novel The Peach Rebellion, and her writing made me reflect on the illustrators who influenced me as a child and ‘tweener. The one who doesn’t belong is Sendak, but I included him because there has never been a book that gave me greater joy to read aloud.

And “Classics Illustrated,” true, was an industry, not an artist, but their “War of the Worlds” scared the bejabbers out of me when I was ten. I don’t think I could’ve handled the Spielberg version unless they needed another screamer to give poor Dakota Fanning’s vocal chords a break.

My brother Bruce had an entire drawer in our bedroom full of neatly-stacked “Mad” magazines, probably in chronological order, which I, the messy one, raided.

We also had two enormous pull-out drawers beneath our bedroom closet stocked from keel to gunwales with Disney comics, “Classics Illustrateds,” and a long-forgotten anti-Commie series, “Blackhawk,” about an international cadre of fighter pilots who did cool tricks like standing up in the cockpit to lasso Russki jets in midair.

We even had some Dick Tracy comics. When one of Dick’s fugitives refused to come out of his motel room at the end of a wing, Dick simply used his tommygun to inscribe a capital “Z” in the exterior wall. End of fugitive. I don’t think he was Mirandized.

I’d forgotten how bluntly charming Garth Williams’s Miss Bianca illustrations were. Sadly, Disney made a cartoon version with Disney art at its low point–The Rescuers were two-dimensional cutouts and Bianca’s voice was provided by Eva Gabor, who was charming in “Green Acres,” a low point for American comedic television but several notches above “Gilligan’s Island.”

I have a brief Gabor story somewhere. Remind me.

Most of these artists have one thing in common: When you’re a little boy, you can get lost inside their work. They take you to another place.