The “bad guys” who star in Australian author-illustrator Aaron Blabey’s fast-selling Bad Guys series of graphic novels for early readers aren’t really bad—they’re just misunderstood. That’s one of the pillars upon which Blabey builds his comedy about a crew of notoriously scary animal pals (a wolf, a snake, a shark, and a piranha) who want to change their image. “My boys were deeply interested in badass animals—I believe that’s the scientific term—like sharks and snakes,” Blabey said of his inspiration for the books. “And this happened to coincide with an impulse of mine to create a story about a group of misunderstood characters bonded together by the prejudice of others. These elements collided one evening in my head and the Bad Guys were born. It was quite a night.”
The series, a top performer for Scholastic Australia since its 2015 debut, landed in the U.S. market this past January with Scholastic’s publication of The Bad Guys, quickly followed by The Bad Guys #2: The Bad Guys in Mission Unpluckable in March, and the May release of The Bad Guys #3: The Bad Guys in The Furball Strikes Back. The Bad Guys have enjoyed a warm reception in the States and have become an immediate hit. To date the books boast a combined total of more than one million copies in print in the U.S. and Canada, across all of Scholastic’s channels. Book #4, The Bad Guys in Attack of the Zittens, arrives next month, and a fifth volume, The Bad Guys in Intergalactic Gas, is scheduled for January 2018.
For senior editor Jenne Abramowitz, who oversees the series in the U.S., it was love at first read. “We work really closely with Scholastic Australia and we were watching the series for a long time,” she said. “They’re the kind of books that you see and instantly know what they are, and you get so excited about them because they’re just so hilarious. From the moment we got them in, I was in my publisher’s office telling her that we had to publish these books in America.”
Blabey’s tales have been attracting a readership via several appealing elements. “The humor just really gets at that seven- or eight-year-old kid,” Abramowitz said. “They’re silly and they’re snarky but they still have so much heart to them. This is something that kids really respond to.” Another thing she’s noticed is that Blabey’s work speaks to both boys and girls, and it spans age groups. “He’s the kind of writer and illustrator that everyone can find something in, and find something to love.”
Though humor and action are at the fore in the Bad Guys adventures, Blabey stressed the series’ equally important emotional core. When asked which character he most relates to, he said, “There’s a bit of me in all of them, but I guess I have the softest spot for Mr. Snake. His flaws are legion and he finds it tremendously difficult to stay on the path but deep, deep down he knows that Mr. Wolf is right—there’s more to him than meets the eye.” Blabey believes that on the whole the series is “the story of two journeys: Mr. Wolf’s struggle to change how the world views him and Mr. Snake’s struggle to change how he sees himself.”
U.S. sales of the Bad Guys books started snowballing right away, according to Abramowitz. “We signed up a few books and then we ended up signing up eight books almost immediately,” she said. “We don’t always go in with eight books, but the excitement was so great it took barely any time before everyone here felt we had to be all in and we had to go big with it. I think a lot of us saw in him the hallmarks we see in many of our most successful authors: he’s got the goods. He knows how to tell a story.”
Eight books may be the current official series count, but Blabey has his own idea of how many volumes he will eventually produce. “But if I told you,” he mused, “it would spoil the fun. That said, there will be a number of story arcs, so think of the [current] books as the first few installments of series one. There’s so much more to come.” Abramowitz has her eye on more than eight titles as well. “We feel like the sky is the limit with this series,” she said. “We see endless potential.”
Scholastic featured Bad Guys giveaways—including posters and cardboard punch-out sunglasses and neckties—at both BookExpo and BookCon this spring. The series has also been a hit at 50 pop-up reading festivals with bookstores and libraries across the country as part of the Scholastic Summer Reading Road Trip RV tour. “The Bad Guys is one of the hottest series on the trip,” Abramowitz noted. “Kids are really responding. They love dressing up as the Bad Guys in the ties and sunglasses.” She believes that these road trip events are helping to pique interest in Blabey that will carry over to the “Mission to America” marketing campaign that will roll out for the books next spring. “We think by the time ‘Mission to America’ arrives, the excitement will have reached a fever pitch.”
Between the summer and next spring, Scholastic has plans for a fall digital book trailer promoted via kid-focused advertising. And creating even more exposure, Scholastic Book Clubs will distribute more than two million copies of a free The Bad Guys Guide to Being Good book to students in classrooms around the country this fall.
“It’s so satisfying to see something that everybody loves so much and believes in so much do well,” Abramowitz said. “I love watching the kids in my life read the books and try to figure out which of the bad guys they identify with. Personally, I feel a little bit like the piranha, but that’s just me.”
Ellie Berger, president of Scholastic Trade, has enjoyed watching the series’ trajectory. “It’s exciting to see the enthusiasm for Bad Guys!” she said. “In addition to the laugh-out-loud humor, I think kids are also drawn to the bright neon packaging that’s fresh and fun.” Berger noted that in the wake of strong sales for the Bad Guys via Scholastic Australia, “We’ve developed a comprehensive and strategic marketing campaign to bring the same excitement to readers here. We look forward to bringing Aaron Blabey to meet his American fans next spring, and taking the success of the series to the next level.”
Blabey is looking forward to arriving stateside, too. “I can’t wait,” he said. “Each morning, I walk down to my studio at the bottom of our garden in the Blue Mountains in Australia. I sit down at my desk, I make up stuff and then somehow that causes a chain reaction that has me arriving in cities across the USA. It blows my mind. I’m looking forward to the entire experience.”
In the meantime, he’s got plenty of writing and illustrating to do. In addition to the Bad Guys books, Blabey also creates picture books, including a series about Pig the Pug, which Scholastic Press began rolling out in the U.S. last December. Pig the Elf, third in the series, is due in October. And a standalone title, Thelma the Unicorn, also under the Scholastic Press umbrella, has a November pub date.
For Blabey, watching his books take off in America as well as seeing them published in 29 other countries [roughly four million copies in print, worldwide] has been a heady time. “It is a privilege that is almost too big to process,” he said. “I currently have the best job in the world. Period.”
