David Wiesner: Hi, my name is David Wiesner, and I'm the author and illustrator of Mr. Wuffles. I wanna tell you a bit about how I came to create this book, and then I'll talk about one of the pages with you.

Mr. Wuffles was a long time coming together. It began with a cover that I did for Cricket Magazine in 1993. On the front was an image of a flying saucer that had landed in the desert. The crew has emerged and is posing for a picture. When you open the back to see the full image, it's revealed that they have in fact landed in a sandbox, and they're very tiny.

Some years later, I began to try to turn this idea into a book. The opening was visually terrific. We follow the ship as it lands, and the visitors begin to explore. Fingertips then enter one frame to set up the turn of the page that reveals the true nature of the situation. The trouble was, I couldn't come up with anything else that good for the rest of the story. I tried on and off for several years, but it just never gelled.

And then one day years later, as I was drawing random things in my sketchbook, the solution appeared. I drew a flying saucer, something I do a lot, but this time, I covered the ship with little pointy things. I really liked the texture of it, and I thought, and this is the thing you can't plan for, "You know, my cat would love to scratch its neck on this. What a cool cat toy." And there was my story. I immediately saw a funny and antagonistic relationship between the cat and the little aliens, and the rest of the story just flowed out.

One thing that did come out of my many attempts to write this story was the idea that each species in the book would speak in a visually different language. For the aliens, I created a group of about 30 symbols based on geometric forms. The bugs speak in little scratch marks. The cat meows, and the human speaks in English. While the languages aren't literally readable, the gist of their meaning can be inferred from the context of the pictures: body language, gesture, and facial expressions convey what's happening. It's in this kind of visual storytelling that picture books really excel, and why I love to make them.

In the middle of the book is a double-page spread that shows the moment that the aliens meet the bugs behind the wall of the house. The bugs have created murals of their battles with the cat, Mr. Wuffles, that are like prehistoric cave paintings in Lascaux, France. This is one of several times in the story where art is used as another way of communicating.