Kinney, like his popular cartoon character, charms with self-effacing honesty



GUILDERLAND — Jeff Kinney draws a mesmerizing Wimpy Kid.

More than 20 million viewers have followed the fate of his always-slightly-slumped middle-schooler Greg Heffley online at Funbrain.com. His handwritten diary, with a cartoon on every page, published last year — Diary of a Wimpy Kid — made the New York Times Best Seller List.

And Monday morning, a library full of kids at Westmere Elementary School greeted Kinney with cheers, and watched attentively as he created their favorite characters with a few deft strokes of his computerized pen.
"You think the Giants are big"" asked enrichment teacher Robert Whiteman, warming up the crowd of fifth-graders. "This man rocks your world."
Kinney, a gentle, almost quiet man, charmed the kids with a story that could have come from Greg Heffley. Kinney became a cartoonist because, he said, "I was trying to save face." As a freshman in college, he went to a meeting for the school newspaper. He wanted to help out so he said he could create a crossword puzzle.
"They laughed. So I said, ‘I’ll do cartoons’ to save myself embarrassment," said Kinney.
And he did. He created a comic strip called "Igdoof" for the University of Maryland’s Diamondback.

Kinney drew a quick sketch of the title character for the Westmere kids. As he drew on his computerized tablet, the image was projected on a large screen at the far end of the library.
"Oh, my Lord!" exclaimed one girl as Kinney drew the character’s huge eyes and ear, and duck-like nose. Kinney then drew the way Igdoof thought of himself. It looked like Greg Heffley, the wimpy kid of diary fame.
"I think there’s a lot of me in Greg," Kinney told his rapt audience. "A lot of characters in literature are heroic." Greg doesn’t always do the right thing.

Kinney related the story of Greg chasing the kindergartners with a worm on a stick and how his friend was going to take the blame for it. Greg talks to his mother who advises him to do the right thing.
"Greg does the right thing for himself," said Kinney. When his mother asks, "Did you do the right thing"" assuming that would be telling the truth, Greg says yes and she takes him out for ice cream. "There’s no adult around to change his reality," said Kinney.
"I spent a lot of time, trying to remember what I was like as a kid," he said.
Kinney provided a real-life example that inspired a Greg Heffley episode and cartoon. "When I was a kid," he said, "I was the slowest one on the swim team...I decided I could get out of it by hiding in the locker room. I would freeze to death in there. So I would cover myself with toilet paper."

He projected on the screen the drawing of a skinny boy, slouching and unhappy, wrapped in toilet paper as the Westmere kids giggled, some covering their mouths, others nudging their neighbors.
Kinney said later that, when his brother was on the swim team as a 6-year-old, he thought the starting gun had real bullets. "So he’d stay under water until he thought the bullet landed," he said.

World audience
Kinney began his talk by showing the kids a 77-page spiral-bound journal he kept. "I started writing smaller and smaller," he said, displaying a page crammed with tiny handwritten comments nestled together in cartoon-like bubbles.

His day job is developing new web games for Poptropica and Funbrain. So Kinney would write late into the night, developing the unfolding diary entries of Greg Heffley.

Kinney told the kids how he lives — with his wife and two sons — in a 250-year-old carriage house in Massachusetts.
"I worked on the book down in the basement at night. At three or four in the morning, I’d post and get e-mails from China or India," said Kinney.
"That’s really cool," he said of the instant feedback, comparing it to the sort of exchange typical of his childhood where you might correspond with a pen pal twice a year.

The Westmere students peppered Kinney with questions as they selected different topics — Jeopardy-style — from brightly-colored squares he projected on the library screen.
When the kids picked "Boys vs. Girls," Kinney projected two different cartoons for them to look at — one, a group of middle-school girls and the other of boys in Greg’s universe.
"The boys look a bit dumber than the girls do," observed one girl.
Kinney smiled and pointed out one boy’s huge nose and another’s crazy hair. "They all look different," he said.
For the girls, he pointed out, "The only thing different is their hair...In Greg’s world, they are all the same. They travel in packs; they go to the bathroom in pairs."
When the kids picked the "Digital Ink" category, Kinney told them how he used to pencil, ink, and then scan each of his drawings. "Each doodle would take one-and-a-half hours," he said. "With 2,000 drawings, that took a lot of time."
With his computerized pad, Kinney said, "I can draw right to the screen."
He illustrated this for the kids, showing them how ideas are expressed in cartoons. The shape of an open mouth, clear back to the tonsils, was easily identified as "yelling."

A dark twister-like squiggle over a character’s head was quickly read as anger.

Several interpretations were offered for star-like bursts — dizzy, shocked, having an idea.
"Dazed," intoned Kinney.
When the kids chose the square labeled "Von Idoten Umzingelt," Kinney asked for a volunteer to read the German; a fifth-grade boy obliged.

His book, Kinney said, is being translated into 20 languages, including Chinese, Russian, and Vietnamese.

The Germans, he said, have no word for wimp, so the title is translated as "Greg’s Diary: I’m Surrounded by Idiots."
In the Japanese edition, the characters, which Kinney drew with four fingers, will each be given five because, said Kinney, "Hundreds of years ago, a class that was discriminated against was called the Four-Finger People." He was told, "Careers would be destroyed" if the book were printed with four-fingered characters.
"I expect many other surprises," Kinney said of going international.
Kinney said he has gotten calls from television channels and movie-makers about turning the book into a film. "I don’t know how I feel about that," he said.

His second book, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodric Rules, just being released, features Greg’s older brother, Rodric. And Kinney has planned his third book, which will center on a conflict Greg has with his father, who wants to send him to military school. He will sign a contract for five books, he said.
"I hope," Kinney said, "I have the good sense to quit when I run out of ideas."