If there's a common thread among bestselling books for elementary school boys, it's the merry mischief maker traipsing through a comics-laden landscape. It is now a common literary trajectory that boys begin their independent reading lives following Dav Pilkey's "Captain Underpants" before moving on to Jeff Kinney's "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" and the more recent phenomenon, "Big Nate" from author and illustrator Lincoln Peirce.
That changed three years ago when Lincoln reached out to Jeff who had been in contact with him since almost two decades earlier when their roles were reversed. Jeff, at the time, was a college student and comic strip aspirant who had been reading Big Nate in the Washington Post.
He wrote to a handful of cartoonists seeking advice, Lincoln wrote back, and the two maintained a correspondence for a couple of years before falling out of touch. It was only after Jeff had created a sensation that Lincoln reached out to him who was speaking at the local public library. The two met in person and he asked the Big Nate cartoonist if he would create content for his new kids' website called Poptropica.
"My hope was that his strip would find a larger audience and that it would be published in book form," Jeff said. Two months after its Poptropica debut, Lincoln landed a 16-book deal with a publisher. The series was based on the comic strip, chronicling the small and large dramas of life in the sixth grade with stylish humor whether Nate Wright is being sent to detention for shoving too many green beans in his mouth or trying to avoid taking tests.
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