By JAMES D. WATTS JR. World Scene Writer on Sep 16, 2013, at 2:22 AM Updated on 9/16/13 at 3:38 AM
If Jeff Kinney had not missed getting on a plane in May, it's possible he would not be making a trip to Oklahoma later this month.
"I was on this trip to Brazil," said Kinney, the best-selling author of the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series. "And I happened to miss my flight, so I was there in the airport in Miami."
It was May 20, the day when a gigantic EF-5 tornado carved its destructive way through the center of Oklahoma.
"I was sitting there in the airport, watching the CNN reports coming in, and was just horrified by it all," Kinney said. "I'm a father myself, and my heart just went out to the victims, and especially the parents whose children were in the schools that were destroyed. That feeling of uncertainty and fear, hanging on to every image - it was almost too much to imagine."
What Kinney could imagine, however, was trying to do something that would provide some measure of assistance to the young people of the city of Moore.
So Kinney approached some of his colleagues in the world of young adult literature about participating in a benefit event titled "Drawn Together: Cartoonists Benefit Moore School Libraries."
"I took part in an event like this after the shootings in Newtown," said Kinney, who lives in Massachusetts. "And that inspired me, because it showed me that writers and artists could come together and make a positive change."
The first person he talked to about the project was Dav Pilkey, who writes and illustrates the popular "Captain Underpants" series of books.
"I'd never spoken with him before, but he was interested right from the start," Kinney said. "He told me that he had been doing a school program on the same day as the tornado hit Moore, and what happened has hit him pretty hard."
The two other authors Kinney approached, Lincoln Peirce and Stephan Pastis, were also eager to take part.
So all four will be making two presentations in Oklahoma Sept. 27-28. The Sept. 27 event, co-sponsored by the Tulsa City-County Library, will be held at the Cox Business Center. The following day, the quartet will appear at a similar event at the Lloyd Noble Arena in Norman.
INSPIRED
Jeff Kinney: The "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" author was inspired to organize a benefit for Moore schools by a similar event in which he participated in Newtown, Conn.
"These authors have never been together under one roof before," said Gary Shaffer, the library's CEO. "This is going to be an awesome event for a most worthy cause. It's exciting to present these best-selling authors in Tulsa for the first time and to share in the rebuilding of school libraries."
Each author will talk about their work, its inspirations, and how they create it. A question-and-answer session will follow the individual presentations.
A number of items, ranging from books to T-shirts and posters, will be available for purchase and signing. In addition, there will be a raffle table with books, prints and original artwork.
All proceeds from the event will be donated to the Moore Public Schools Foundation for its school library collections.
Beyond raising money for a good cause, Kinney is looking forward to the event for other reasons.
"I do these kind of hybrid, cartoon-and-text mashups, and because of that, I've never really thought of myself as a legitimate cartoonist or a legitimate writer," he said. "If I go to a cartoonist convention, I really don't feel as if I have a place. And at writers' conventions, I don't feel I fit in there, either.
"But the people taking part in this event are really my peers. We all are cartoonists at heart, who are working in this hybrid novel format."
Kinney's ambition had always been to be a cartoonist whose comic strips would be found in major newspapers all over the country.
"It was what I felt I was born to do," he said, "but I didn't have the right talents, and the opportunities to break into the business were dwindling or already disappeared."
Kinney then turned his attention to an idea about writing a kind of nostalgia piece - a story about adolescence, and what it was like to be a kid, that would appeal to adult readers.
He was working as a video game designer for an educational website and, when the company was looking for ideas to maintain traffic to the site during the summer months, Kinney mentioned he had this serial he was working on that was meant for adults, but might also appeal to kids.
"Diary of a Wimpy Kid" started appearing on the FunBox website, and readership quickly grew to the point that 20 million people read the misadventures of Greg Heffley as he struggled to deal with all the things that parents, older brothers and well-meaning if misguided friends can throw at a middle-school-age kid.
That led to Kinney being offered a book contract.
"And I have to admit," he said, "I was really surprised when I was told the book was going to be marketed to kids."
But that strategy paid off. The seven volumes of the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series have been best-sellers, with more than 85 million copies in print. The series has adapted into three films starring Zachary Gordon as Greg Heffley. The eighth book, "Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck," will be released in November.
"It's about Greg realizing that he's not made too many good choices, and so he turns his decision-making over to a Magic 8-Ball, with disastrous results," Kinney said.
Kinney compares his process of writing a book with that of a stand-up comedian - he thinks of the jokes first, then puts together a plot that will showcase the jokes to their best effect.
"My goal is to write the funniest book I can," he said. "The downside is, sometimes the plot suffers because of that."
Kinney said he thinks he's used up all his memories of life as an adolescent, so he gets a lot of his inspiration from Parenting magazine.
He also has some potential material at hand but is very careful about how he might use it.
"I have two children, one in the third grade, one in fifth grade," Kinney said. "And so it's been a bit like seeing childhood a second time through their eyes.
"But even so, there are limits," he said, laughing. "One of my kids did something pretty embarrassing that I almost put into the book. But at the last moment I decided to take it out. And that's probably for the best."
"Drawn Together" participating cartoonists
- Jeff Kinney, author of "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," which has sold more than 85 million copies and earned him a place on Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World. Kinney is an online game developer and designer for Poptropica.
- Dav Pilkey, best-known for his "Captain Underpants" series, is also the author of "Dog Breath," "The Paperboy," "The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby" and "The Adventures of Ook & Gluk: Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future."
- Lincoln Peirce (pronounced "purse") is a cartoonist and writer whose character Big Nate appears daily in more than 300 newspapers as well as in a series of books that have made the New York Times Best-Seller lists.
- Stephan Pastis is the creator of Pearls Before Swine, an acclaimed comic strip that appears in more than 700 newspapers. His first book for young readers, "Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made," was an instant New York Times best-seller.
James D. Watts Jr 918-581-8478
james.watts@tulsaworld.com
Original Print Headline: Wimpy they're not
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