Kicking things off, The New York Times talks with Mad artist Al Jaffee about how he creates all those groovy fold-ins:
The fold-ins these days are as full of youth culture as ever. (March 2008: “What major star has recently admitted receiving illegal career-damaging human growth injections?” And a picture that looks as if it’s going to be Roger Clemens folds to become Jamie Lynn Spears, pregnant.) So the first thing that strikes you when Mr. Jaffee greets you at the door of his studio on the East Side of Manhattan is his age. This man, still credibly negotiating the milieu of teenagers, is 87.
“I work for a magazine that’s essentially for young people, and to have them keep me going, I feel very lucky,” Mr. Jaffee said. “To use an old cliché, I’m like an old racehorse. When the other horses are running, I want to run too.”
Next, Toon Books has an interview with Geoffrey Hayes, author of the forthcoming Benny and Penny:
BK: And how did you finally break into children’s books?
GH: It wasn’t until I was 26 or 27 and I had been working at a Japanese architect’s firm doing drafting and interior design, and I got laid off with a lot of other people. So I thought that would be a good time to beef up my portfolio, which I did, and then I started taking it around to various publishers. And a lot of editors or art directors were very interested, but nobody really gave me a concrete response until I went to Harper and I met Edite Kroll. She not only liked my work, but she was determined to get a book out of me. So we worked together until I did my first book, which was called Bear By Himself.
Finally, The Providence Journal looks at the man behind the uber-popular Wimpy Kid series, Jay Kinney:
Kinney was an online game developer and designer for Family Education Network, which runs a series of Web sites for children, parents and teachers. That was where he first published episodes from “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” as a way to get kids to stick with the Web site after the end of the school year.
The site was so popular that Kinney sold the series to Amulet Books, a division of Harry N. Abrams, which published the first of five “Wimpy Kid” books last spring, and it was an immediate hit.
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:35 am
Do y’all remember reading books such as Bread and Jam for Frances, or Frog and Toad are Friends? Geoffrey Hayes’ work on Benny and Penny reminds me of that timeless kind of art that kids will love reading for many years to come.
Jeff Kinney’s books are a big hit in my school – they were the top sellers in the book fair I ran earlier this month, I completely sold out, and I had lots of copies compared to most of the other titles in the book fair. They’re attracting all kinds of readers, not just the reluctant reader boys, but more advanced readers, and girls, too. And it was the KIDS who made their parents buy the books – that says something about Kinney’s popularity right there. Interestingly, I had to reassure some parents that the books are good reads; some parents think they should only get “uplifting” books with “high literary quality” for their kids. I kept telling them, if your son doesn’t really like to read but he wants to read this, get it for him, encourage the reading however you can.