When asked about the inspiration for his first children's book, Ann Arbor author Jim Tobin tells a story parents everywhere will recognize immediately: Settling his kids into bed with those consistent rituals all the experts recommend, he would sing them a song to send them off to the land of Nod. And in an excellent example of consistency having an effect, his youngest latched onto one in particular as her preferred soundtrack, requesting a seemingly endless loop. "I got so sick of 'Old MacDonald,'" Tobin laughed. "It was like, 'How many verses are we gonna do?' But eventually, some part of my brain said, 'You know, it's amazing nobody ever put the vowels in place of the e-i-e-i-o....'" Well, we can't say that anymore.

It happened that one of Tobin's daughters played soccer with the daughter of syndicated "Speed Bump" cartoonist Dave Coverly — and it further happened that Coverly had been a fan of Tobin's long before he knew the two were neighbors. So the freelancing soccer dads got to chatting, and when Tobin said he'd always wanted to do a children's book, they bounced some ideas off of each other. Coverly describes Tobin's inspiration as a "really brilliant idea. Before you knew it, we had written and illustrated half of the book, and it was one of those things... I could tell it had legs."

The result is "Sue MacDonald Had a Book," (Henry Holt) which starts off with Coverly's adorably wide-eyed and ponytailed girl just trying to get a little reading done, when all of the vowels on the page suddenly decide to make a break for it. Sue chases each of them through a verse-long adventure, rescuing them from such perils as microbes, a life of crime and Kathmandu — all the while using the rhyme scheme to feature the sounds of each vowel in turn. Such a linguistic accomplishment is maybe not surprising from Tobin, who followed up a journalistic career at The Detroit News with several books, freelance projects, and recent tenure as a journalism professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio — although the foray into youth literature by this esteemed author of "Ernie Pyle's War" might be. But what kid doesn't remember his picture books — the lush and vivid illustrations, the room for a little bit of wackiness there always seemed to be in the stories?

"I certainly had a special feeling for children's books from when I was a kid," said Tobin. "I was crazy about them. And when my daughers were little, like all parents I loved reading to them. The form of the picture books, the idea of condensing a real story into so few words is really interesting to me. How do you tell a satisfying story in just a few pages? I must say it is harder than it looks - that text went thorough 24 drafts."

Interestingly, Coverly felt that the departure from his one-panel cartoon work led him to the opposite discovery. "It was actually a ton of fun, because I could still draw in my style but it was a much more wide-open experience. Now I had one or two pages at a time to work with, and once I got rolling I felt like I had a lot more options for my art. Sometimes I thought that I was being lazy and should be filling reams and reams of paper, but we had agreed early on that we liked the books that just showed the actions in the story - (kids at) ages 4-7 aren't going to want to delve into all those details. It was a blast."

Since the front of the book proudly proclaims "A Vowel Sing-Along to the tune of 'Old MacDonald Had a Farm,'" it seemed reasonable to ask if the pair's debut appearance with it at Nicola's Books would include, say, a little amateur concert with some audience participation.

"No singing," declared Tobin emphatically. "Absolutely no singing." In the pause that followed while I tried to figure out if he could possibly be serious, he laughed and relented. "The thing is, it's funny about the singing. I think it actually works better as a spoken piece of verse, and that's the way I do it in my head. But of course you can say it however you want to with your kids."

Coverly was no less adamant: "Oh my God, no. Karaoke is my nightmare, I mean, I have horrible dreams about this. Maybe we can rope a kid into it — an older kid, or maybe one of ours. Hey, maybe Nicola will sing it for us!"

Jim Tobin and Dave Coverly will be at Nicola's Books, 2513 Jackson Ave., at 4 p.m. Saturday to read from their first children's book, "Sue MacDonald Had a Book."

Leah DuMouchel is a free-lance writer who covers books for AnnArbor.com.