Jeff Kinney (l.), who brought his Diary of a Wimpy Kid to Charles Kochman (r.), executive editor of Abrams ComicArts, at the very first ComicCon in New York, just published his third episode in the series, The Last Straw. (This count does not include the journal-like Diary of a Wimpy Kid Do-It-Yourself Book, published last October, which Kinney said he modeled on Dr. Seuss's My Book About Me). Kinney created title character Greg Heffley for funbrain.com, his day job for Pearson. The author spoke during Kids' Day at ComicCon on Sunday, February 8. Attendance at the convention was up 15% from last year to just under 77,000 attendees; at least 4,200 children were in attendance on Kids' Day this year; nearly a fourth of them, it seemed, were in Kinney's audience. Shelf Awareness caught up with editor Kochman in the cavernous Javits Center.
Is it true that Jeff Kinney approached you at ComicCon?
We met at the very first ComicCon in New York in February of 2006.
But the launch book, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, came out barely a year later, in April 2007!
I loved the book and I wanted to make sure it got out sooner rather than later, so we both worked really hard. Even though some of it was online, it meant we had to work to reconceptualize it for print. He wasn't published and didn't have the demands on his time that he does now.
Jeff said the next one would be published in fall 2009.
Yes, fall 2009. There's no title or color yet. The first question kids ask is, "What's the color of the next book?"
Did Wimpy Kid start out as a children's book?
[Jeff and I] both thought it was an adult book, and in the editorial meeting, [my colleagues] said, "Why don't you take it to the kids' editors?" It seemed to make more sense the more I thought about it. The thing I was most struck by was the parents coming up to me; no wonder it began as an adult book and wound up as a kids book, because it really belongs in both worlds.
And it's really neither fully comic nor fully prose.
We modeled the first edition after The Catcher in the Rye--the red and yellow on the cover, the modern-day Holden Caufield--and also [thought of it as a] Phantom Tollbooth for this generation. It's a great hybrid; its DNA is in comics. Comics are a part of its vocabulary--the frustrated black tornadoes, the word balloons--he incorporated the stuff that Scott McCloud talks about in his book [Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels].
We could have easily been very safe and said he's gotta be smiling on the cover, he's gotta learn a lesson, it must have a happy ending. By not adhering to conventions, [we made that] a strength [of the book]; it became its own thing.
Did you ever dream that Wimpy Kid would be this kind of phenomenon?
Never, in all my loving of the project and loving Jeff. I felt that there were enough eight-year-old kids who would appreciate it. This kind of phenomenon happens once in a career.
Along with the fourth, as yet untitled, colorless Wimpy Kid installment, Kochman is currently at work on at least two other titles for fall 2009, both for Abrams' ComicArts imprint. One is The TOON Treasury of Funny Comic Books for Kids edited by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman, with an introduction by National Ambassador for Young People's Literature Jon Scieszka. "It's not superhero comics," explains Kochman, who spent a dozen years at DC Comics and also has a background in children's books from his days at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. "It's divided into categories, like funny animals--the material really speaks to parents and kids of all ages. There will be some Captain Marvel, who was the first real children's superhero. But there's an early Dr. Seuss story, a Pogo story strip, and other material like that." Another title, aimed at adults, is Dread & Superficiality: Woody Allen as a Comic Strip edited by Kochman. It contains artist Stuart Hample's syndicated newspaper comic strips from the 1970s and early '80s featuring the acclaimed comedian and director. Stay tooned.--Jennifer M. Brown