The new children’s book The Invisible Parade brings together two luminaries of science fiction and fantasy: San Antonio-based illustrator John Picacio, who’s won both the World Fantasy and Hugo Awards, and bestselling author Leigh Bardugo, the LA-based author of the Grishaverse novels.
Released by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, The Invisible Parade follows a girl named Cala who isn’t eager to participate in her family’s Día de los Muertos celebrations because she’s still too pained by the loss of her grandfather. On the way to the cemetery, she encounters the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse who guide her on an adventure through which she discovers her own bravery and ability to process grief.
Picacio, who’s Mexican American, pitched the idea for the book to Bardugo nearly a decade ago by describing it as The Wizard of Oz set in a graveyard. Picacio’s vibrant artwork and Bardugo’s riveting prose make the book not just an exploration of Latinx culture and personal growth but a journey full of imagination and wonder.
The pair’s promotional tour for The Invisible Parade will come to San Antonio on Saturday, Aug. 30. The event, sponsored by Nowhere Bookstore, will take place at Texas Public Radio’s downtown headquarters. Picacio and Bardugo will discuss The Invisible Parade and sign copies.
The following interview with the pair was edited for length and clarity.
The book’s Día de los Muertos theme will be familiar to San Antonio readers, but as you tour the book, are you finding that those in other places are also familiar, or at least intrigued and want to know more?
John Picacio: I think the movie Coco probably had a lot to do with making Día de Muertos mainstream. I mean, that might be a really gross overgeneralization—
Leigh Bardugo: I don’t think so. I mean, that’s what Disney does.
JP: Yeah, there you go. Book of Life was another film that came out — it was by a guy named Jorge Gutiérrez — and I think that had some effect as well. But I want to say this: those are almost a decade old at this point. So, I definitely felt, for myself — I think Leigh felt this way, too — that we weren’t interested in being Coco Jr. We weren’t interested in being Book of Life Part II or doing anything that was inspired by those things. But I think those did help to make the holiday more mainstream. So, the book’s not out yet, but when I’m out there starting to do this early publicity, I’m seeing people receptive to the imagery. But what I’m very, very pleased to see is that we’re blowing people’s minds a bit, because they’re not used to seeing the Día de Muertos imagery the way Leigh and I have presented it in this story.
And that’s very encouraging to me, because I am very familiar with this holiday, and I think San Antonio will be very familiar with it. And there are icons that we are definitely paying tribute to within our story. But let’s face it, I think Mexican American culture is infinite. I am Mexican American, and I love where I come from, but I want to see where we’re going, and I want to help to present paths for where we’re going in terms of how we visualize ourselves, how we imagine ourselves. And Leigh was my accomplice in this mission, and I think we’re doing something different and engaging. But we won’t know until the people take it into their hands and their hearts — and that’s still coming.
LB: I think the iconography is quite familiar to a lot of people at this point, but I think that the meaning of the holiday and the way it might relate to the way they’re experiencing life, or loss, or grief is something I hope we can open more of a door to.
And I think, too, there are multiple points of entry for people who come to this story. They might be looking for an adventure. They might be looking for a way to talk about loss with somebody who experienced it, or they might be experiencing loss themselves. They might be trying to find a way to talk about grief with a child, or they might have a friend who’s their own age in their own peer group who they want to discuss it with. And my hope is that the book will have a lot of different doorways that people can walk through to access that story.
I know the picture-book concept for this work has been part of the plan all along, but I have seen adult picture books, and some could argue graphic novels are picture books of a sort. At what point did you settle on the idea this should be aimed at young readers? Why was that important?
JP: It was decided the moment it came into my head, and that’s the honest answer. I have stories in my head, and I think they come in different shapes. And I knew that I had the beats for this thing and that it should be a picture book because it was a simple story, and I wanted something that would be accessible to everyone, all the way down to the youngest reader. So, it was going to be a picture book.
Now, to psychoanalyze that, I haven’t gotten there yet as far as wondering why. I think maybe part of it is my kid. At that point, I was dad to a 6-year-old daughter. I think that’s about the closest I’ve come to saying, “Why would I have done a picture book at this time in my life?”
But I would say something else that I knew pretty early on. I wanted Leigh to do it with me because I am a fan of her work. I buy her books on the first day of release, every single one of them. I love the way she writes. I love the way she thinks. I laugh when I’m around her, and I just thought, “She’s going to have a sensibility that will bring something to this.” I liked also that she wasn’t Mexican American, and I thought that that would, in some ways, break some new ground that some people might not be comfortable with. So, those were some early decisions I made, and we’ll see how many of them turn out right, but that one I know I got right.
LB: Thank you, John. For me, I had been toying with the idea of a picture book about grief, because I wanted to find a way to help parents, or friends, or families talk about something that we don’t talk about often. My experience in grieving the loss of my father was that things were very noisy for a while, and then they got very quiet. And it’s not because people don’t care. It’s because they don’t know the right thing to say. Frequently, when we don’t know the right thing to say, we end up saying nothing and leaving people isolated at a time when they need community the most.
So, I had been toying with this, but I could not find the right way into the story. And then John came to me with this, and I was like, “Oh, of course, it’s an adventure.” It’s structured as a fairy tale of a girl who’s going on this journey and has this lesson to learn before she can reconnect with the living and reconnect with our experience of appetite, joy, happiness. And that, for me, resonated very powerfully.
It seems like there’s a lot of universality in the theme. Do you hope that will help readers understand that even though we, as humans, have different traditions, different iconography, different ways of looking at the world, we are united in dealing with death and loss?
JP: Absolutely. And I think part of what I saw with some of these larger mainstream presentations of Día de Muertos, such as Coco and Book of Life, is they were successful on a lot of levels, but there was still a sense of, I don’t know, maybe class worship that I wasn’t necessarily comfortable with. I wanted something that was a little more about all of us, and I wanted something that would hopefully make people who aren’t Mexican or Mexican American realize that we’re not so much the other as they might think, that we’re more like them than they might imagine.
And I think the way Mexican culture embraces death in order to celebrate life very vigorously, on a daily basis, that’s the way we process grief — and it’s not something that all cultures handle the same way. So, if we were to present a story that could help people who weren’t Mexican or Mexican American process grief, maybe that would be something that could help bridge some gaps.
LB: I think the point I would want to make is this: how does the culture welcome people into it? We didn’t set out to make people eat their vegetables, right? This is not about like, “Oh, take your medicine. Learn about this.” We wanted to take people on a real adventure and invite them in.
We work in different fields in the art, but we’re both keenly aware of the way art has been flattening because of social media, because of AI, and we wanted to push against that. This book is weird. We’re weird. And the book is, itself, strange, and it doesn’t necessarily slot into an easy category, but I think it has a lot of heart in it, and it’s different from anything else out there. So, no matter how people choose to embrace it or reject it, we made the thing we wanted to make. And that, for me, is a powerful thing at a time when I’m not sure how much room there is for artists making what they want to make.
Speaking of things being flattened, it does feel sometimes that when art invokes the iconography of Día de los Muertos, it’s the most familiar tropes. It’s the sugar skulls and the calavera makeup and that sort of thing. The art in this book is distinct from that. How delicately did both of you tread as you tried to make sure you honored traditions but put your own stamp on the presentation and ideas?
JB: I didn’t feel like I had to handle it delicately, at all. Really, Leigh and I got to play in the sandbox together, and she had some ideas about how she wanted to present certain icons. And those conversations did influence the way I wanted to process the look of some of these characters and tell about our history and our social values — and also the aesthetic of some of these characters. For instance, there’s a reference in one of the major illustrations to the San Antonio Chili Queens. There are some deep holes when it comes to Mexican American history, and our social values, and where we came from. I don’t expect everybody to fully understand these things, but I hope what we’re doing hits people emotionally as opposed to just intellectually.
And if we hit them in the heart, maybe, at some point, maybe want to take it a little deeper to understand, “Well, why did you do this?” And maybe they start to make some connections to things that maybe they wouldn’t have seen before. I’m talking about people both within the culture and outside of it. There are a lot of references that are baked into these characters, but I wasn’t really looking for an Easter egg hunt. I was looking more to try to hit people in the heart, and I think that’s what Leigh and I both do. … We’re looking for how we can make people feel like this is a story they can connect with.
LB: I think we both feel that tradition is really important. It can be very grounding, and it’s why those traditions are built into Cala’s experience with her family, but we also wanted to find ways for Cala’s story to be hers, to belong to her. So when people read this, they felt like they are participating in it with her, and it isn’t just a walk through a museum display. This is about her journey when she leaves our ordinary world and she enters that cemetery.
For John, this was The Wizard of Oz moment. This is when Cala starts to come back into the illustrations, but it’s when Cala begins to reconnect with the living by entering the world of the dead. We wanted our story to belong to us and to belong to her. And I think for readers to be able to connect with it, it needed to have a little bit of audacity.
$29.49, 2-4:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 30, Texas Public Radio, 321 W. Commerce St., (210) 640-7260, nowherebookshop.com/event/leigh-bardugo-and-john-picacio-present-invisible-parade.
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This article appears in Aug 21 – Sep 2, 2025.