Scott Christian Sava is best known for his web and print comic The Dreamland Chronicles, but this year he is branching out in a new direction: He has just published four new children’s graphic novels, Ed’s Terrestrials, Pet Robots, Hyperactive, and My Grandparents Are Secret Agents, and he expects to have four more, Cameron and His Dinosaurs, Gary the Pirate, Magic Carpet, and The Luckiest Boy, out by midyear and still more after that. The books are being released through Sava’s Blue Dream Studios, which became an imprint of IDW Publishing in 2008.

Although Sava hired other artists to draw them, the new books—all written by Sava—share a common cover design and simplicity of concept: “I wrote a list of cool things I would want to do as a kid,” Sava said, and each book is based on one idea: Hyperactive is about a kid with super speed, Pet Robots is about kids who get pet robots, and Ed’s Terrestrials is about a kid whose tree house is crashed, literally, by aliens.

The new line is aimed at young children who may not have read a comic before. “I want to use the same storytelling they are used to, which is cartoons, movies, video games,” Sava said, “so I don't need every little window of a building in the background of each panel. I want flat colors, bright colors, I want the characters to pop, I want things to be simple.” Most of the books have four or five panels to a page and just a single word balloon per panel—or no word balloon at all. “The writing is very decompressed because I come from animation,” said Sava, whose credits include work on the "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" and "Spider-Man" television cartoons, and the Nickelodeon movie Emperor. A lot of the humor comes from body language and reaction shots—“It’s not just the dialogue, it’s the expressions,” he said.

Sava’s twin six-year-old boys are his chief product testers. “I read these to my kids and I see how it goes from panel to panel, and what they laugh at,” he said. They have also shaped his choice of material. “We’ve got books like Owly and Robot Dreams, and I think they are great, but my kids want to see action or comedy,” he said. “They hate cute.” On the other hand, Sava’s sons love sequences in which a character gets something totally, comically wrong. “Their favorite part of Ed’s Terrestrials was when [a character] said ‘At the intergalactic food court we have every possible food known to man, anything, you name it.’ Ed says ‘Pizza?’ and he goes, ‘What’s pizza?’ ‘What about hamburgers?’ ‘What’s a hamburger?’ The kids were just rolling around on the ground laughing.”

Sava sets aside time every morning to work on his graphic novels. “When I reach a roadblock—it might be 45 minutes, it might be two hours—I close the book and I downstairs and work on The Dreamland Chronicles,” he said.

The Dreamland Chronicles is Sava’s bread and butter; he says he makes enough off the ads on the site to cover his house payments. The children’s books are more of a gamble. He pays for the artists, the coloring, and some of the lettering, then turns over the book to IDW for printing and distribution. He and IDW will split the profits 50-50, he said, but at the moment, he’s out of pocket tens of thousands of dollars to pay for the art.

While turning over the illustration to someone else was a challenge, Sava felt he had little choice. “The art for The Dreamland Chronicles is so time-consuming,” he said. “To write and illustrate a second book concurrently would kill me. I’d never see my family. I’d never sleep.”

Sava teamed up with IDW last year at the suggestion of Diamond Kids Group director Janna Morishima. “She said, ‘You need a marketing person,’” Sava said. “I said, ‘All I’ve got is books.’” But Sava knew IDW vice president of sales Alan Payne from their days working together at Malibu Comics, and when Morishima heard that IDW was looking for more children’s titles, she suggested that Sava talk to them. Now Blue Dream Studios is an imprint of IDW. “I keep my identity, they do the printing, Alan is out there selling the book,” Sava said. “They said ‘You write what you want, we’ll publish it.’ It’s an artist’s dream.”

As the books begin to come out, Sava is looking at other media. Disney bought the film rights to Pet Robots in 2007, and MTV picked up the rights to Hyperactive based on the script alone, before it was even illustrated, Sava said. He is currently working with producer Alexandra Milchan to market the remaining comics.

Like many other creators, he is also looking at web distribution. Sava built the audience for The Dreamland Chronicles by putting it online, but the model is different for his self-contained graphic novels: By the time he built an audience, the story would be over, he said, although he would consider putting the books on a high-traffic kids’ site. And he is looking at other options, including creating iPhone applications for his books. “There are so many possibilities digitally, and that’s where the industry is going, as much as people are fighting it,” he said.