The cartoon guide, by Larry Gonick, an illustrator, and Woollcott Smith, an academic number-cruncher, had nice pictures but was, essentially, a rather heavy stats textbook.
Now very few if any children's books are published without pictures, but this doesn't mean that you as writer have to draw them — that's for the illustrator.
Artists such as Jessie Willcox Smith, illustrator of children's literary classics, and Johnny Gruelle, creator of Raggedy Ann, were very influential in the development of her early drawings.
So for your Art Department, how would you like to hire an award-winning children's book illustrator who is great with kids and has a face you can't say no to?
He's the illustrator from the Eloise books and I met him several years back and he started telling me about these murals that he was doing for people and I thought, " Oh, I want a mural too."