Interview: Jeffrey Brown

On Saturday, June 29, and Sunday, June 30, while attending the American Library Association’s Annual Conference in Chicago, IL, I ran around to as many of my favorite kids comics creators as I could and asked them all the exact same questions. Keep in mind, exhibit halls are crazy loud and crazy busy, so there is a lot of background noise. Let me know in the comments if you have trouble hearing anything and I’ll translate for you.

I do have Jeffrey Brown’s books Darth Vader and Son and Vader’s Little Princess in my children’s collection. Sure, they probably aren’t strictly kids’ books, but then, technically, neither is Garfield (how many kids buy newspapers, after all?). But kids sure do giggle while they read them.

The folks at Scholastic must have noticed the kids giggling, too, because they wasted no time in figuring out how to harness this wave. Jeffrey’s new Jedi Academy book hits a sweet spot: it grabs Star Wars fans, illustrated novel fans, comedy fans, and the parents of all of these fans are on board, too. And let’s face it, any book that a reader’s dad wants to borrow rises to a whole new level of cool.

Books mentioned in this video:

• Blankets, by Craig Thompson
• Persepolis: the story of a childhood, by Marjane Sartrapi
• Maus: a survivor’s tale, by Art Spiegelman
• Palestine, by Joe Sacco
• Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
• Fables vol 1: legends in exile, by Bill Willingham and Lan Medina
• Hellboy vol 1: seed of distruction, by Mike Mignola
• Jimmy Corrigan: the smartest kid on earth, by Chris Ware

Filed under: Interviews