Posted on Sat, Apr. 19, 2008

NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLER

'Wimpy Kid' opens doors for author

Kids' book with cartoons started out on the Web

DAVID MEHEGAN

Boston Globe

PLAINVILLE, Mass. --

He lives in an ordinary, all-American sort of place, much like the unnamed setting of his best-selling book, "Diary of a Wimpy Kid." Jeff Kinney's phenomenal novel-in-cartoons plots the everyday life of a regular boy in the sort of school situation that readers of any age might recognize.

But there's nothing ordinary about his success.

Since it was published last year, "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" has spent 47 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list for children's chapter books, with more than 1 million copies in print. Volume two, "Rodrick Rules," appeared last month with a first printing of 250,000, and bumped its predecessor to second on the list. Three more installments are planned. Meanwhile, a movie by Nina Jacobson, who oversaw production of "Pirates of the Caribbean," is in the works.

Through all the excitement, the 37-year-old author and artist of "Wimpy Kid" has kept his day job and tried to keep his head on straight. "I'm still stuck at the starting point," Kinney, a married father of two, said during an interview in his toy-filled house. "I'm absolutely shocked that the book even got published."

"Diary of a Wimpy Kid" is the diary of Greg Heffley, a student of unspecified age and grade in an unnamed middle school. The text appears handwritten on lined paper, and the narrative is supplemented by simple cartoons, also by Greg. He is a crafty kid, trying to navigate school and family life, while avoiding the bullies who pick on him. His schemes for improving his status -- running for class treasurer, becoming a crosswalk guard, or making money with a Halloween haunted house -- usually backfire.

Kinney majored in computer science and criminal justice at the University of Maryland, but what he really wanted to be was a syndicated comic-strip artist.

After college, he came to Massachusetts in 1995 and took a job as a layout artist at the Newburyport Daily News, moved on to a medical software company, then in 2000 became a computer-game designer for Pearson, the British-based book publisher. Today he manages two Pearson game sites, Poptropica.com and Funbrain.com. He and his wife, Julie, have two sons -- Will, 5, and Grant, 2.

But Kinney never gave up his cartooning dream. In 1998 he had begun working on "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," eventually filling notebooks with enough stories for five volumes. "I wrote it for adults," he said, "and never thought that it would be for a kids' audience."

In 2004 he had the idea of putting the first three volumes of the epic on Funbrain.com, where it is still free to visitors.

Dealing with ugly bullies

"Wimpy Kid" is a blend of the remembered and the imagined. "I did a lot of remembering, and a lot of inventing, about what it was like to be a kid at that age, with a sort of amoral moralism," Kinney said. "There are a lot of instances in the book where Greg thinks he has learned his lesson or done the right thing, when it's clear to the reader that he hasn't." Adults in the book are well-meaning but dim. "Part of the fun is that you expect an adult to come in at any moment and set things straight, but one never does."Though the stories are comic, Greg's predicament is serious. He's powerless to alter the situation that adults have placed him in. One well-founded fear is of being picked on; the book is full of ugly bullies, though no one gets hurt. "I don't think anyone looks back fondly on middle school days," Kinney said. "It's the only level in school where some kids are literally twice as big as others."

The line drawings are carefully thought out. "There are lots of messages," he said. `'The girls are always drawn exactly the same, except for their hair, but the boys all look grossly different from one another. It's a message to the reader that Greg `gets' boys but doesn't 'get' girls, so he draws them all the same." He omitted references to current popular culture and minimized technology - no iPods or Game Boys in the cartoons - so that the story would not seem dated to future readers: `'There is no sense of place or time," said Kinney. `'It could have happened 20 years ago or today."

After years of rejections by publishers, in 2006 Kinney carried a batch of samples to Comic-Con in New York, the international comic-book show. "I got a very cold shoulder," he said. "I was leaving the exhibition hall, when I stopped at the Abrams booth (publisher Harry N. Abrams) and met Charlie Kochman."

"I showed him my samples," Kinney said, "he looked at it for less than a minute, and said, `This is exactly what we're looking for and why we're here.' "

4th- and 5th-grade fans

Fourth- and fifth-graders are the book's largest audience, Kinney said. He has been swamped by e-mail from kids and adults. While some parents deplore the absence of disapproving judgment of Greg's behavior, others wrote to Kinney to say that his book was a godsend.

One such parent was Dayna White of Plainview, Texas, a high-school English teacher with an 8-year-old son, Evan, whom she could not interest in fiction.

"I ordered the book, and Evan took it to his bedroom, read it in one day and loved it. This just opened the door. He has read a couple of other novels since then."

The same happened with fourth-grader Giancarlo Iona, 10, of Lafayette Hill, Pa. "He saw it on Funbrain.com, and he asked me to get it," said his mother, Tara Iona. "He stayed up all night reading it."

Giancarlo got on the phone. "It was really funny," he said. "I've got my whole class into it."

While he works on volumes four and five of "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" and handles the demands of success, Kinney says he's keeping his full-time job.

"The things we're doing with digital publishing are so exciting," he said. "And that's what made `Diary of a Wimpy Kid' possible to begin with. I don't want to be designing pillowcases with Greg Heffley's face on them for the rest of my life."