In 2007, author and illustrator Jeff Kinney published his first book of the wildly-popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. His round-headed main character, Greg Heffley, was a middle school boy trying to navigate the ins and outs of the junior high experience, a time when kids are still trying to figure themselves out and making a few mistakes in the process. That relatability, and the hilarious situations that Greg created, or was victim to, quickly earned Diary of a Wimpy Kid legions of fans, both young and old. And I am one of them.
It wasn’t quite how Kinney pictured his career. Originally, he wanted to be a cartoonist for newspapers (remember those?). According to the Wimpy Kid website, Kinney began writing down his ideas for Diary of a Wimpy Kid in 1998 with plans to make it into a book. After six years, he published it online at funbrain.com in daily installments. He got a book deal in 2006 and in 2007, the first Wimpy Kid book was published by Harry N. Abrams Inc. under Amulet Books. Since then, the books have been continually on The New York Times Best Sellers list.
Now, Kinney has debuted his 17th book in the series. The new title, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Diper Overlode was released October 25. Readers get to take a ride along with Greg Heffley as he recounts the rise (we use the term loosely) of his brother Rodrick’s band, Loded Diper, on their quest to win the local Battle of the Bands.
For the release, Kinney has added a musical performance to his book tour. Auditions were held for bands who could do Loded Diper proud. A band of young men, Reservations at 8, were the lucky musicians to get the opportunity to tour 12 cities with Kinney, their gear stashed in a wrapped and branded Loded Diper van.
Houston is one of the cities on the list for The Diper Overlode Show. Kinney and the Loded Diper band (at least until the end of the tour) will be at Alief Taylor High School Auditorium November 2 for a musical performance hosted by Blue Willow Bookshop. Tickets are available for purchase and each ticket allows admission for two concert-goers and one pre-signed copy of Diper Overlode (Diary of a Wimpy Kid Book 17). Previously bought books and photos will not be signed for safety precautions. Doors open at 5 p.m. and the public is asked by Blue Willow Bookshop to be no earlier than that.
The Houston Press was able to snag a phone interview with the author and get a little insight into the creative world of Jeff Kinney and his much-loved characters. As a mother of two kids born in the aughts, I am well-versed on the Wimpy Kid series which has produced laugh-out-loud reading for my entire family for the past 15 years. I definitely had some questions, as did my family.
The first thing was to find out how the first concert of the series went in Cleveland, Ohio the night before. Kinney said, “It was super exciting and everything I had wished for. It felt like a rock concert which is pretty cool for a book event.”
As to how the concert idea itself came about, he said, “When I decided I wanted to write about Rodrick’s band, Loded Diper, I knew I wanted to do something really special with a live band and last year this time we’d been planning… we’ve been doing parking lot drive-thru experiences for two years and I thought that’s what we’d be doing, but when the world opened up a little bit, things got a little bit safer, we decided to do a full-out rock concert. It really is something else.”
Because Rodrick’s band is a heavy metal band, we had to know what Kinney’s personal musical tastes were growing up. “I did listen to a lot of hair metal. I was sad when grunge came along and wiped all that out, ’cause those were good times.” When we mentioned the leather pants and spikes of metal bands, Kinney replied, “You know, you want your rock starts to look like rock stars, not just guys hanging out at Starbucks.”
Some of Kinney’s ideas for Rodrick’s band came from the fact that his brother Scott, who the book is dedicated to, had his own basement band. In fact, Kinney says that the character of Bill, the 35-year-old lead singer of Loded Diper, who lives with his “gramma,” is an amalgamation of a few different people who came through their house because of his brother’s band in high school. (Spoiler Alert: It’s also Bill’s girlfriend, Becky, who Yoko Ono’s the band right before their big performance.)
We asked Kinney if he has to remind himself that he is writing the books for kids. “Yeah, I still think I am writing for adults because when I began writing Diary of a Wimpy Kid, originally, I aimed it at adults. I spent eight years writing on it and I never thought I’d find an audience of kids. But that’s exactly what happened.”
I admitted to Kinney that I first thought the books were kind of sarcastic for my daughter when she began reading them at the age of eight. Of course, once my husband and I began to read the books, we found them hilarious and even a bit nostalgic for our age group (which is similar to Kinney’s). I asked him about his protagonist Greg’s propensity to get himself into crazy situations in which he sometimes comes out unscathed and at other times, receives his comeuppance.
“I don’t necessarily see Greg as a bad kid. I just see him as a human being with lots of flaws. Of course, he’s documenting his life at the worst time to document your life. You know those really awkward middle school years. He’s caught in this pre-adolescent amber where he can’t grow, he can’t change, so it’s fun to write about a character that’s kind of messy.”
He goes on to say, “I’m not trying to create an aspirational character. I think there are plenty of aspirational characters in children’s literature. But they can be a little bit boring, I think, when you have characters always do the right thing and actually just act like miniature adults. I wanted a character who was more like I was as a kid. And that was very flawed.”
And that messiness is accompanied by some flat-out funny humor, which is what kids (and adults) really seem to love about the Wimpy Kid series.
Kinney said that children also seem to love the drawings which have been analyzed online because of the different shapes of the characters’ heads. We were curious to know why Greg’s baby brother, Manny, has a completely different head shape than the rest of the Heffley family, but we didn’t get an “it was the mailman” backstory. Instead, Kinney was surprised that people think that much about the meaning of his characters’ head shapes. ” I certainly didn’t do that consciously”, he says.
We also asked about the film versions of his Wimpy Kid books and if he was concerned about how his readers would react to his characters in human form. “That’s a very insightful question. Yeah, I was very worried about that. Of course the way Greg draws himself doesn’t look very much like a person…You kind of have to take this leap, you have to in your imagination. There’s an inconsistency between the drawn characters and the human beings, so I was concerned about that.”
With four big budget live-action films in the Wimpy Kid repertoire and one animated film, Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2021), there will soon be a new animated version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, coming out on Disney+ December 2. The animated film will be Kinney’s drawings. He has seen the final product and is very excited about it. “It’s really fun to be able to do these animated films because I’m getting to go back and take my books which aren’t structured really well. I didn’t really know what I was doing. It gives me the chance to revisit those stories and neaten them up.”
As for revisiting his stories, we asked Kinney if ever considered taking Greg Heffley and his friends into high school. “I never did. I think a cartoon character is kind of like a promise, a promise not to change and I think cartoon characters stay the same forever. They’re reliable when so many other things in life are not reliable.”
Diper Overlode Show with Jeff Kinney
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Diper Overlode
Wednesday, November 2, 6 p.m.
Alief Taylor High School Auditorium
7555 Howell Sugar Land Road
eventbrite.com/jeffkinney
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2022.
