Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules

 

Meet Jeff Kinney, originally uploaded by Litandmore.

A few of my third graders were reeled into Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I started to read it a few weeks ago and keep getting distracted by other books.  The following is an interesting  USA Today article about Jeff Kinney and one wimpy kid.

Long before his online comic strip became a series of best-selling books, Jeff Kinney wondered about his quirky title.

He knew that Diary of a Wimpy Kid would grab attention, but worried “if kids who aren’t wimpy would even want to touch it.”

He’s not worried anymore.

Nine months after the first Diary was released, there are more than 1 million copies in print. The Diary sequel, subtitled Rodrick Rules, made its debut at No. 7 last week on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list.

Kinney, a would-be cartoonist who became an author almost by accident, says he’s shocked to see his book so high on the list.

“It’s like a school quiz: ‘Which name doesn’t belong here?’ Mine.”

His readers (Kinney says he’s most popular among fifth-grade boys) would disagree. They’ve embraced his creation, a bullied but wisecracking middle-school student named Greg Heffley. (Rodrick is his slacker older brother.)

Kinney, 36, the father of two sons, ages 5 and 2, lives in Plainville, Mass., and says he “was a regular kid who had my wimpy moments.”

He dreamed of being a syndicated cartoonist like Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes). But after drawing a popular strip for the student newspaper at the University of Maryland, he collected nothing but rejections. He became a Web designer.

He also persisted and thought about getting his cartoons published as a book, “sort of through the back door.” Coincidentally, his company was seeking content for one of its educational websites. He offered his would-be book as a daily online strip, or webcomic. It was posted in 2004 and soon had 70,000 daily readers (funbrain.com/journal).

In 2006, Kinney attended Comic Con and happened to meet Charlie Kochman, an editor at Abrams, and showed him a printout of Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Kochman remembers thinking, “The art is simple but not at all simplistic, and instantly relatable to kids of all ages. Jeff is easygoing, funny and charmingly awkward — just like his main character. I instantly knew he and I could work together.”

A five-book series is planned.

That about 80% of the material is already available online for free didn’t trouble the publisher. Abrams CEO Michael Jacobs says, “Books still have immense power for kids.”

And “for kids who don’t normally read or finish books, and for their often frustrated parents and teachers, Wimpy Kid helps make them feel like readers; for those who already do, they’re simply too good and too funny to resist.”

Part of the appeal, says Elizabeth Bird, a New York school librarian, is that Heffley “is not a good kid. He’s not a bad kid, either. He’s just a kid.”