Every actor, the cliché goes, wants to direct. And if an actor becomes famous and powerful enough, chances are that desire will be fulfilled – whether or not talent in front of the camera translates into talent behind it (which is how you end up with Kevin Spacey’s forgettable Beyond the Sea, or Johnny Depp’s pretentious The Brave). As important as it is for creative people to constantly look for new challenges and directions, it is equally important to know one’s own strengths and limitations.

This is why the author-illustrator model can be such a dicey proposition. The interplay of text and images in a picture book is so critical and delicate, with each playing an equally important role in its overall impact and success, that having one person handle both can lead to disaster. For every delightfully dense Wallace Edwards creation, there are hundreds of undercooked, single-creator picture books crying out for a collaborator.

When it works, however, the results can be weird, clever, eye-popping, and magical – all at the same time. Frank Viva’s new work, Outstanding in the Rain, is a perfect example of an author-illustrator treating a picture book like a playground where he can try out the wildest ideas, while ensuring the whole thing does not become a self-indulgent mess. Viva, a hugely in-demand Toronto illustrator whose work has appeared on the cover of The New Yorker, creates with a very light hand here. The book’s concept is as simple as it is goofy. A young boy with a Charlie Brown–like round head and tiny cap travels with his mom (or older sister, or babysitter, though mom seems most likely) to a Coney Island–type boardwalk on his birthday. While there, they have ice cream, slide down a big slide, eat cake on the beach, and ride a rollercoaster before heading home.

The goofy part comes in the form of the pages themselves, in which holes are cut to reveal images or text from the previous or subsequent page. When the page is turned, the hole creates a new image (for example, a subway car’s window in one spread becomes the boy’s teeth in the next) and reveals the playfully transliterated text (“Those sandwiches there, they look the best” transitions into “On the sand which is there, we stop and rest”). This is precisely the kind of high-concept design that sinks so many author-illustrator books, and yet Viva makes it work by keeping it all disarmingly fun. Even the groaners (as when “her ear” becomes “her rear”) add to the overall sense of lightheartedness. Ultimately, the book has no lesson or moral – except maybe that even something as simple as cutting a hole in a piece of paper can help tell a story.

Drive by Kellen Hatanaka, though less silly and effervescent than Outstanding in the Rain, is another example of an author-illustrator knowing exactly how to keep various elements working together harmoniously – where to push the boundaries a little, where to pull back. It is an opposites book for young readers, structured as a family drive from urban house to rural cottage. Along the way, the overloaded station wagon passes two dogs (one big, one small), a couple of stores (one open, one closed), a field of animals (including one donkey, and many cows), and so on.

Hatanaka’s colourful digital images look remarkably like pasted-in paper patterns, giving the work a slightly old-fashioned feel. (The wood-panelled station wagon helps, too.) Some are quiet and almost geometrically minimalist (like the long bridge the car crosses), while others nearly overwhelm the page (as with the contrast between the heavily floral “worm’s-eye view” and the sky-high “bird’s-eye view”). The contrasts are occasionally too subtle for very young readers to grasp right away, but the images are pleasing enough that they won’t mind spending more time with the book, figuring them all out.

Collaboration remains the ideal working paradigm for picture books, but Outstanding in the Rain and Drive both show that great things can happen when an illustrator gets the chance to go it alone.