An 8-Armed Hug

Once you meet her, eight-legged crawlies never seem quite so creepy again. She’s Miss Spider, a curvaceous yellow-and-black vision with lush-lashed green eyes, curly red top-knot and demure smile, the prettiest and sweetest literary web-spinner since Wilbur Pig’s pal Charlotte.

With her first appearance in 1994 in author-illustrator David Kirk’s astonishingly beautiful, highly praised children’s book, “Miss Spider’s Tea Party,” the arachnid with an appetite for blossoms, not bug juice, gained fans of all ages. In subsequent best-selling books, she gained a shy little soul mate (“Miss Spider’s Wedding,” 1995) and a new set of wheels (“Miss Spider’s New Car,” 1997).

Kirk, whose glowing, vividly colored illustrations of Miss Spider’s eye-filling, flower-filled fantasy insect world are actually meticulously rendered oil paintings, is working on “Little Miss Spider” books for preschoolers.

He also wrote the verses and oversaw the art and animated films in the just-released CD-ROM spinoff, “Miss Spider’s Tea Party,” from Simon & Schuster Interactive, aimed at ages 3 to 7, in which users play games to help beetles, fireflies, moths and other buggy friends come to Miss Spider’s house for tea. (A word of warning: With its elaborate sound and graphics, the CD-ROM is most successful if your PC or Mac exceeds the minimum system requirements listed in the packaging.)

‘Every Step Has Been a Pleasure’

Success didn’t happen immediately for Kirk, 44, whose books are each a year or two in the making--”and that’s working all the time.”

A Cleveland Institute of Art graduate, Kirk was an independent toy maker for 12 years, and his colorful, quirky painted wooden toys became the springboard for his book illustrations.

“When I first did ‘Miss Spider’s Tea Party,’ I really just hoped that it would go into a second printing and that I’d get a little more money,” he said. “And right away, they had to order a second printing, and then a third, and then there were a couple more and then Madonna read it on TV” (on MTV, to promote her “Bedtime Story” video). Later, Hillary Rodham Clinton chose the book to use in her 1997 launch of a national literacy drive for children.

“It wasn’t an overnight big walloping kind of success like Harry Potter,” Kirk said, but “every step has been a pleasure.”

And, although he influences and oversees the creation of toys that are merchandised as tie-ins with his characters, “I don’t have to sit in a paint booth and spray things red in the middle of the night [anymore]. This is much better.”

Kirk shares his home in upstate New York with two hamsters, two dogs, two hedgehogs--and perhaps a spider or two--and with his daughter Violet, now almost 13, who inspired the original book, which Kirk began working on in 1990. (The books are published by Scholastic Press/Calloway.)

“My daughter was a big insect enthusiast when she was small,” he said. “She just loved to find any kind of little creature and make friends with it, and she was always very careful with them and sweet, never hurt them and always let them go. So I wanted to do a book about bugs that would be of interest to her.”

Miss Spider herself, with her gentle spirit and whimsical charm, doesn’t have a particular human model. “She’s just my ideal bug type,” Kirk said.

Not that his books are all sweetness and light. The sunny side always prevails, but Kirk’s lavishly detailed, three-dimensional paintings include undertones of darkness and danger. In “Miss Spider’s Wedding,” for instance, with its strong message about the value of gentleness and kindness, a beetle friend’s disapproval of Miss Spider’s mild-mannered suitor opens the door to a rather alarming meanie.

Language isn’t babyish, either, in Kirk’s rhyming storytelling. He uses such words as “mortal dread,” “slovenly” and “adroitly,” confident that children, who are engaged in vocabulary building every day, will be interested and curious.

In addition to “not writing down,” Kirk explores emotional themes that appeal to adults too: “Being left out, going shopping, getting married. I like to think up a story that kids will enjoy, but I don’t necessarily write it so that only kids will enjoy it. I write it so I’ll enjoy it.”

Earlier this year, Kirk branched out with a non-Miss Spider project, “Nova’s Ark,” a book about a resourceful little robot boy who crash-lands on a planet and builds robot animals to keep him company. Unlike Kirk’s Miss Spider oil paintings, all of “Nova’s” vivid 3-D illustrations are computer-generated.

He is now working with an assistant artist, enabling him to finish his books more quickly--”the last one I got down to four months, which was incredibly fast by my standards”--but Kirk is teeming with ideas that he yearns to have the time to get to.

“I’m working on ‘Little Miss Spider Goes to School,’ or some such thing; I don’t have the title yet. I’ve got a whole bunch of other books that I’ve got starts on,” he said. “I want to write things for older kids; I’ve got some small novels and short stories for an older age group. I’ll probably work on a Little Miss Spider CD-ROM, and we’ll probably do one on the robot boy [Nova] that will be a space adventure combined with some kind of building elements.”

As much as he would like to break out of the “preschool box,” however, Kirk plans to keep on satisfying fans’ requests for more books about the dainty, well-loved Miss Spider.

“I’m always happy when a new book comes out,” he said. “It’s fun to get letters from people who have read them and loved them, and to get letters from kids who tell me it’s their favorite book. They’ve broken out of the heaps of millions of children’s books and they actually mean something to people. That’s the reward.”

* “Miss Spider’s Tea Party” CD-ROM, ISBN 0-671-31800-4, Simon & Schuster Interactive, PC/MAC, $20. (800) 223-2336.