LIFTOFF!

The 1969 Apollo 10 mission—considered the “dress rehearsal” for Apollo 11 and the moon landing—inspires Alma Thomas, a Black abstract painter, to create an iconic painting, Snoopy Sees a Sunrise.

Though space travel is serious business, the astronauts give their spacecraft playful nicknames. Apollo 10’s command module is dubbed Charlie Brown and the lunar module, Snoopy. Accordingly, Alma selects a fitting name for her work. Jacket art and endpapers artfully introduce the dual narrative; against the black of deep space float bright, confettilike shapes representing Alma’s signature “stripes.” Skillfully employing mixed-media and handmade scans, Crews uses different styles for each story. As the astronauts prepare for launch, the art looks fairly straightforward; as Alma prepares to paint, the palette turns colorful, with softer, rounded lines. The spare but informative text moves effortlessly between the parallel stories of the moon mission and Alma’s painting. Even the description of abstract expressionism (“Thomas…takes in impressions that she observes and then expresses those things in a picture”) is clear and age-appropriate.  Crews’ visually arresting design takes advantage of the dramatic vistas seen by the astronauts: The lunar module hurdles around a tilted gray moonscape, and when astronaut Thomas Stafford exclaims, “You ought to see it up here,” multiple vintage TVs display images of the fragile and beautiful Earth. By contrast, Alma Thomas’ interpretation is one of glowing colors surrounded with a pink wash of early morning.

A powerful paean to both the space program and a noteworthy artist.