TIM JACOBUS IRL (STINE)
·Updated:
·

I first met Tim Jacobus in the summer of 2013, when my band hired him to create a portrait of us. Jacobus illustrated R. L. Stine's Goosebumps book series, and we asked him to paint us in that style, not knowing whether he would be up for it. Thankfully he was.

We thought this might be a smart move on our part, because there were probably ways to capitalize on Goosebumps nostalgia and use the portrait to raise our profile. It might be a great leap forward in our quest for fame. But more than that, I thought it would just be cool. It had been a major childhood fantasy to enter the world of Goosebumps, and if nothing else, this would be that.

In the portrait, the five members of my band are standing in front of a giant robot with a mohawk. In terms of sheer wish fulfillment, this was the jackpot: We looked like a Goosebumps book, but we also looked like a band. The dream had come true. As a guy trying to make it, corny affirmations like this are crucial to my sanity.

The band's all here. Illustration: Tim Jacobus

It didn't get us to the Grammys, though. Our social media campaign to promote the portrait was successful, but less than life-changing. We made a five-minute documentary and put it on YouTube. People dug it, and then people moved on. In the end, the whole thing became a cool bit of lore for us, something we could look at and say to ourselves, "OK, remember what's possible."

But since we released the portrait, I've stayed in touch with Tim Jacobus. And this, I've come to realize, has been the real jackpot.

Jacobus is fifty-five. He lives in Budd Lake, New Jersey, twenty minutes away from the house he grew up in. He's into progressive rock; the ringtone on his cell phone is "Comfortably Numb," and he says Roger Dean's album covers for Yes are the reason he became an artist. He has one teenage son, Jack, to whom Goosebumps is meaningless.

Does Jacobus feel like a famous person? He says the answer is no. I thought he might say yes, as he remains a cult hero to legions of Goosebumps fans. For instance, his recent appearance at Comic Con drew hundreds of fans, some with tattoos of his artwork. If it were me, I'd feel famous.

Instead, his favorite thing about Goosebumps is that it was a hit with kids, because "kids are no bullshit." Many of the fan letters he received from young readers said things like, "You're my third-favorite artist."

The artist at rest. Photo: Ivan Anderson

At the height of Goosebumps-mania, he estimates that he received five letters a day, and some of these became serious correspondences. One reader, who first wrote to Jacobus at age nine, has stayed in touch through military service in Afghanistan and the birth of a son. He and Jacobus have exchanged letters for close to 20 years at this point.

Jacobus did the covers for all 62 books in the flagship Goosebumps series published by Scholastic throughout the '90s. If you include the various special editions and spinoffs, he created a total of 103 for the entire franchise. Although his style was an instantly recognizable part of the Goosebumps brand, his contributions were strictly work-for-hire, meaning that Scholastic has always owned the intellectual property. For this reason, he does not expect to be involved in the Goosebumps movie that is currently in production. He looks forward to seeing it anyway.

Jacobus and Stine have only been in the same room together about a dozen times, but they remain friendly professional acquaintances. They worked separately throughout the Goosebumps years, with Jacobus receiving a capsule summary of each book — sometimes nothing more than the title and a couple sentences — for inspiration. He enjoyed working this way: "I had a lot of room to use my imagination."

Only once did this arrangement fail. For Say Cheese and Die!, the fourth book in the series, Jacobus painted a Polaroid picture of a skeleton family at a barbecue. This turned out to have nothing to do with the plot, so at the last minute Stine added a dream sequence to make it fit.

But where does the food go? Illustration: Tim Jacobus 

Nevertheless, Jacobus says Scholastic's requests for changes were minor and rare. When he first turned in his art for Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes, the publishing company didn't want one of the gnomes to be picking his nose, so instead Jacobus drew him scratching his head. The spider and cobwebs on the cover of Let's Get Invisible! were also a Scholastic request, added later by someone other than Jacobus.

 Illustration: Tim Jacobus 

If you look closely, he says, you can see that they're not very good. (The spider is so small it's hard to make it out.) But Jacobus is serious about this sort of thing. He is unmistakably a perfectionist. I asked him when he first knew he was good, and he burst out laughing. "I still don't."

 Illustration: Tim Jacobus 

His commitment to painting sometimes takes a toll. "When you care about something like this," he says, "it can make you cry." Once, years ago, he gave his (now ex-) wife a painting he'd done of an eagle carrying a rose through the sky, but he took it back four times to fix various details that bothered him. He insisted that the rock formations, which he modeled after Roger Dean's, didn't convey enough depth. He also told me that he's tormented by the memory of one book cover from early in his career — Null-A Three, very '80s sci-fi — in which the main character appears to be cross-eyed. I looked it up. The eyes seem fine.

Not-so-cross-eyed. Illustration: Tim Jacobus 

These days, Jacobus's ongoing passion project is a series of all-acrylic black and white landscapes, each one seven feet wide and two feet tall. These are a departure from most of his gigs, which typically involve digitally enhanced drawing (an industry standard) and must serve the client above all else. Jacobus's landscapes, however, let him be a virtuoso. There's one hanging in his living room: a simple tree branch with a bird on it. Though it's completely unlike his Goosebumps covers, there is something in the texture of the tree bark, something gloomy and intense, that is distinctly the work of Tim Jacobus.

 Illustration: Tim Jacobus 

There is hardly any Goosebumps art hanging anywhere in his house. This is because all his original covers are kept in Scholastic's headquarters in SoHo — but also, I suspect, because Jacobus is simply not nostalgic this way. He is content to own just one Goosebumps original: the cover to It Came from New Jersey!, his 59-page autobiography from 1998.

 Illustration: Tim Jacobus 

The title is significant. Having been raised in New Jersey myself, I recognized the NJ-ness within Tim Jacobus early on, even though he's thirty years older than I am. The suburbs of New Jersey are simultaneously so mundane and so surreal that you are forced to accept the occult. Growing up, it's the only sane way to entertain yourself in a world dominated by trips to CVS. But sooner or later, true spookiness starts to creep in. The first time my wife (who is not from the burbs) visited my hometown, she commented on how horrifically weird it is to walk around at night and see how quiet and dark everything is. "Where is everybody?" she kept asking. What could I say? They were all inside — or who knows.

This is the kind of environment that nudges a young person to listen to heavy metal and play Dungeons & Dragons (I'm speaking for myself here). The entire Goosebumps series, with story after story of kids in the suburbs confronting strange monsters, seemed dead-on. It was a powerful message: in the midst of total banality, maybe anything can happen.

It was in that spirit that my band contacted Tim Jacobus in the first place. I just sensed that we were from the same planet. He's a person who likes Smashing Pumpkins and can draw haunted houses extremely well. He has exactly the imagination you get from a lifetime in Jersey.

But when it comes to a certain other kind of fantasy, he's over it. "If I had to choose between going to an award show to win stuff, or staying home to make a painting better, I would definitely stay home and paint." That being the case, I asked him what his dream gig would be. "Anything that gave me enough money so that afterward I could focus on my own work, full time." He continued, "Or anything that gave me enough money to be a philanthropist."

What sort of causes would he contribute to?

"I'd have to think about it. Maybe hit-and-run stuff. Like going to the lady working at the diner at midnight on Christmas Eve, and putting a couple hundred bucks in the tip jar, and then leaving. I would go around and do that. And I would bring my kid. I would say, 'This is what we're doing now.'"

Painting aside, Jacobus's other primary concern is getting his sixteen-year-old son to pass the written driving test. "I picked up that book you have to memorize in order to pass, the driver's manual, so we could learn it together. It's a slog."

Jacobus and his son now quiz each other on how many feet you need to keep from a parked school bus. During our interview, his son's driving instructor came to the house to deliver a progress report. She was confrontational in that folksy, well-meaning way of a suburban mom with athlete sons. When she saw me standing in the Jacobus family kitchen, she said, "Hi, who are you?"

"I'm interviewing Tim," I said.

"Why?"

"Because of Goosebumps."

"You mean Stay Out of the Basement and all that?" It was clear this was new information to her. She turned to face him directly. "That was you?"

He nodded, then asked how his kid's driving lessons were going. The driving instructor stared at him for another second, taking it all in. Then she took out her paperwork. Goosebumps could wait.

Want more stories like this?

Every day we send an email with the top stories from Digg.

Subscribe