Wimpy Kid Jumps from Screen to Page

by Joy Bean, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 2/22/2007

Last February, Jeff Kinney headed to New York's Comic Con convention with a dummy of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, his novel in cartoons about a middle-grade boy navigating school and life, in his bag. He didn't think he would do anything with it, but thought he should be prepared, just in case.

The moment that Kinney calls "serendipitous" didn't come until he was leaving the building. A friend of Kinney's, who knew he was a cartoonist, had mentioned to him that Abrams had a booth at Comic Con and they had published Brian Fies's graphic novel Mom's Cancer. "On my way out the door, I was walking by the Abrams booth and I saw Mom's Cancer on display," Kinney says. "I don't think I would have said anything to anyone because I'm not like that, but I braved the embarrassment of giving Charlie [Kochman, senior editor at Abrams] my packet because he initiated a conversation with me. He has this way about him that immediately makes you feel welcome." Kochman took a look at the dummy and Kinney's fate as an author was sealed then and there. "He told me, 'This is the kind of thing we're looking for,' " Kinney recalls. Soon after their meeting, Kinney had a three-book contract with Amulet Books, Abrams's middle-grade and young-adult imprint.

Kochman also remembers the moment Kinney stopped to talk with him. "We were exhibiting at Comic Con last year for the first time, getting up to speed on what a comic is. On Saturday, the second day of the conference, this guy came up to me and asked if we publish graphic novels. Twenty or so people had come up to the booth before that but sometimes you just have a feeling if a manuscript is worth looking at or not. When he handed me a copy of [Diary of a Wimpy Kid], I fell in love with it. I was sold right away."

Kochman's colleagues also immediately saw great potential. "This has been the easiest book I've ever signed up [at Abrams]," he says. Shortly after they met at Comic con, Kinney had a three-book contract with Amulet.

A Long Time Coming

Kinney.

The story of Diary of a Wimpy Kid had its start about nine years ago, Kinney says, when he began keeping a journal. The memory book served as a place to put all his ideas and doodles because he had always wanted to be a strip cartoonist, and had also wanted to write a book that anthologized his childhood. "It took me four years of just writing out ideas in the book, then pared that down to just about 10%, which was the good stuff," he says. "Then it took about a year of actually writing it."

As Kinney finished his first draft, he was working for Family Education Network as a game developer and designer. The company, which also owns the Web site funbrain.com, an online community for kids, was looking for content to attract traffic, and when Kinney told his boss he had written a book that might be a good fit for the site, the company decided to test it out. "We started running an entry a day in May 2004," says Kinney. They continued to do so, on a daily basis, until Kinney wrapped the story up in October 2005.

Kochman says what immediately drew him to the book was the drawing Kinney had on the front of the dummy, which has become the cover image for the final book. "When I saw [the illustration] on the cover, I thought, 'I hope the rest of it is as good as this first drawing.' " The overall appeal of the book for Kochman was the way the story "really captured childhood in a way that I can relate to as an adult and that I can see a kid relating to as a middle school student," he says. "[Kinney's] style is very economical so kids can relate to it. It's not too detailed or complicated. It's really Jeff's sense of humor that drew me in. He created an amazing but complex character."

The main character, Greg Heffley, has a slight resemblance to his creator. "Greg does a lot of things that I did [as a kid]," Kinney says. "But I wouldn't want to point at him and say that he is based on me. It's more that there are just similarities between the two of us."

Kinney says there were three storylines going in his Funbrain cartoon and in total the Web version ran about 1,300 pages, which Kochman at Abrams has broken up into three books at 224 pages each. "It's pretty much the same material that was online," Kochman says, "but it has been edited to fit into a book." And depending on how the series does, there may be more Wimpy tales on the way. "Jeff still has a lot more stories in him," says Kochman. "If the first books take off, we hope to do more."

Having had the opportunity to test his cartoons out on kids on the Internet was invaluable to Kinney, especially since he received a lot of mail about the online diary. "The feedback has been great," he says. "It lets me know right away what works and what doesn't." Kids must be responding positively, because since its inception on Funbrain, Diary of a Wimpy Kid has been viewed by more than 25 million visitors.

And now that the comic is in book format, how are the publisher and author categorizing it? "To tell you the truth, I never thought of it before," says Kinney. "It leans toward a graphic novel because if it didn't have drawings it wouldn't be a book at all." Kochman says it will officially be called a novel in cartoons because it's not just a novel but it's not quite a graphic novel. "It's an illustrated novel for kids," he says.

As Diary of a Wimpy Kid reaches bookshelves this month, a year after the fateful meeting of artist and editor, Kinney has come full circle. "He went from nervous booth-approacher to being a signer, in one year," says Kochman.

Jeff Kinney will be at New York's Comic Con this Saturday signing books from 4-5:30 and on Sunday from 10-11:00, then he will head over to Books of Wonder to sign books at 1:00.