Steve Thomas: Max, welcome to Circulating Ideas.
Max Brallier: Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here.
Steve Thomas: So we’re mostly going to talk about the books here, but whenever I have authors on, I like to talk about a little bit of library stuff. I know the library has come up a couple of times in the series. One of the evil books was checked out from I guess the evil section of the library to give the one of the main villains some of her plans. What kind of experience did you have with libraries growing up and How do you work with them today as an author?
Max Brallier: Growing up, I had a really good public library in my town. I grew up mostly in New England, outside of Boston, and it’s a cool, like, early 1900s, big old building and it was awesome. I loved it. There was like a period in middle school where I would ride my bike there after school and hang out for, like, hours. I would read, I’d run around and get into a little bit of trouble a lot, you could like, go down weird stacks and talk to a girl you had a crush on or something. Also like, I was really into story, like story in general and movies back at that age, in middle school and I would go and use the internet and like, just like, I would read the interviews with directors and stuff and print them all out, for hours, it was like a second, a better school for a while.
The library is great. And I remember the moment we moved, like maybe third grade, fourth grade and going in and my mom taking me to the library, it wasn’t the first time, but the first time I sort of like got it, and I was like, “How many books can I get?” And they were like, “You can take out as many as you want.” And I was like, “What??” I had this like massive stack, this absurd stack.
The library is like a really important, not just for the book, but just like the place itself too. It was a combination, which is one of the things that makes them so great. Just recently I did an event with the library in Arlington, Texas, outside of Dallas. I’ve been doing more library events recently. They’re great because like, I do a lot of school events, virtual and in person, then I tour for each new books, twice a year I go on the road for about three weeks each time. It’s mostly school events, but recently it’s been more library stuff, which is nice because then you sort of get the whole community as opposed to a school event which is really nice. Also nice as an author because then you get to see like, how many people wanted to come see you, not how people just had second period while you’re there, which is sometimes great and sometimes really depressing.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And it’s really great now because especially with the spinoff series you’re doing here with the comics, is that comics are so much more in libraries now than they were even a couple decades ago. They’re so much more popular and again, reading is reading and so just whatever is going to get kids to read, that’s great.
Max Brallier: Yeah, I know. Absolutely. Yeah, I’m picturing in my head right now, like the comic section in my library growing up and it was very small and it was a weird collection like weird jumble of things that didn’t go together for any reason except for they had paneled art on them and then like Maus was on its own little section or whatever it is, like, “This one is art!”
So one of the nice things about doing Last Comics on Earth as a spin-off of the Last Kids on Earth is that the paneled art like the comic book style art, I hope reaches a different readership, a different audience, kids who are hesitant, reluctant, to read something, even The Last Kids is not like a traditional novel because it’s heavily illustrated, a hybrid, illustrated novel, whatever you want to call it. So it’s been nice to sort of have that, in addition. “Oh, okay, not for you? How about this?” which is really nice. I still do hope that those kids end up reading prose books as well. Reading is reading, but there’s also the thing when you’re taking what you’re reading on the page and visualizing it in your head and forming that stuff that I think makes it sort of special. Like, we could be sitting each reading the same book and we have totally different images in our head, but at the same time we have the image that the author wanted to give us, but it’s just, it’s different. That’s what I love so much. I’m a huge audiobook person. Like, I used to read audiobooks and I kind of rediscovered them, but I was spending too much money on them because they’re so expensive, but then when someone was like, “Try Libby!” And I was like, ” Oh, right. I don’t have to go to the library and get like a CD. This is great.” And then I’ve been just plowing through audiobooks. It’s just sort of the same thing where it’s like a little bit of a graphic novel thing where it’s like you then get the reader’s voice in there. They determine the rhythm a little bit in a way. It’s always interesting when it’s the author reading it, and then you know exactly what they had in mind.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, yeah, because even if it’s a really good reader, they’re interpreting it in their own way…
Max Brallier: Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah.
Steve Thomas: It’s the same kind of if you read a graphic novel version or see a movie version of something first, and it’s like, “Oh no, now I have a different version in my head. Like, there’s lots of stories that I can remember that I read first and then saw the movie, and sometimes you’re like, yeah, I guess that’s okay, but that’s not what was in my head.
Max Brallier: I remember going to the movies. I think I was a senior in high school when Harry Potter came out and I was like, “Oh, that’s how you say Hermione!” I had it all wrong.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, for pronunciations, it can be helpful sometimes. There’s actually a few of your characters, some of the monsters and stuff, sometimes I’m like, I have no idea what…
Max Brallier: Oh yeah. No, there’s been times where, like, I realized that the spelling of the character, the monster Ghazt, and I was saying in my head a way that it is totally not spelled and there’s no reason that it would be that because I just said it a way and then I think I typed it in a way that wasn’t that way and it went all the way, so now’s what it is. Whenever they record the audiobooks, they usually send me over, like, eight, ten words of like, ” What is this?” And I phonetically do it.
Steve Thomas: So I guess I’ll take that opportunity to say, how do you say the main villain of the series?
Max Brallier: “REZ-ock” [Rezzoch]. Rezzoch the Ancient Destructor of Worlds.
Steve Thomas: Always hard because the font’s different too. And it’s like, am I supposed to be saying, like, with an accent? So before we get too much into it can you give just listeners the basic overview sort of, I guess the Last Kids on Earth series first and then what the Last Comic series within that series is.
Max Brallier: Sure. So The Last Kids on Earth is an illustrated novel series, so it’s a mixture of text prose and illustrations. Book nine just came out. Really there’s like about 13 books because there’s a book five and a half and a book seven and a half, I call them side quests. It’s told from the first person perspective from the main character Jack and he’s a pretty strong like voice and so I wanted to focus on some other character and so that’s why they’re half numbers.
So it’s about basically these four kids: Jack Sullivan, the main character, and then his friends June, Quint, and Dirk. In the first book, there’s a monster / zombie apocalypse that comes from another dimension and hits our world, and they have to survive it, but the point of it, like the big idea behind it is that it’s fun. Like it’s not a sad gray depressing sort of thing. When I write it, I’m always looking at it, especially with the first one where I was like establishing the world, like me when I was watching end of the world movies as a kid or reading graphic novels like that, and being like, I know this is really serious, but it looks really fun as a kid to be like, “Oh, wait, there’s no parents! There’s no rules!” In that situation in real life, sure, different. But like, as a setting for a big fictional adventure “Oh, cool. I can eat all the, I can drink all the soda I want. I can play video games at 5am with my best friend, and I’m only 12 years old. That’s amazing!” and so they battle and survive against zombies and monsters. And then as the series goes on, it gets bigger and becomes more of a big epic quest thing. Starting around book five, it shifts, and now they’re zeroing in towards the end game.
So then the Last Comics on Earth is a spinoff. The second book comes out in April, and it’s full color graphic novel, different illustrator. Jay Cooper illustrates it in a sort of kid style because the idea behind it is what would these four kids Jack, June, Quint, and Dirk do when they have downtime during the end of the world? It’s well established in the series they love comics and Jack, the main character thinks in a sort of comic book-y way. So they write and draw their own comics and that’s what we’re reading. They imagine themselves as sort of strange, goofy, weird superheroes, very much like what I did with my friends when I was a kid. I think what a lot of kids do now. I feel like even more now, like when I go to schools and I’m like, “Raise your hand if you ever write and draw with your friends together. And you make stuff together.” And I feel like it’s more of a thing than it was even when I was a kid, which is great. So, yeah, it’s like this big, bright, colorful world with these kids writing and drawing and imagine themselves as superheroes fighting the bad guys and sort of making fun of each other while they do it, in the text.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And like you said, the regular series is as lighthearted as you can make it when it’s about the end of the world, but then this is like even another level of that because then it’s their imagination. So there’s even a higher level of goofiness?
Max Brallier: That’s really like one of the things that I want to say. It’s silly and it’s weird and there are way less rules than the Last Kids on Earth, it’s a big world with monsters and zombies. No, it’s not really magic per se, but there’s a lot of stuff going on, but I still have a sort of set of rules that I try to follow. And as the series goes on, it gets like more serious, as the characters are growing up and stakes get more real. Also I was just sort of figuring out as I was going, in the beginning, and then I put together a plan when I realized, I think I get to do at least four more then I know where I want to take this.
So part of it was also that I began writing the Last Kids, I didn’t have a kid of my own but now I have a daughter who’s six, and so we started reading stuff that I hadn’t read. Like, we read Dog Man together, and we read 13-Story Treehouse together. I love comics. I love superhero stuff. And I was like trying, “I like it. You’re gonna like it too! And like, so we’re gonna do this together!” which is great when she was four because she would listen. Now, she doesn’t care what dad likes at all, which is also great, but still a little bit, “Really, you’re not gonna watch Star Wars?” She said, “Nope!”
Steve Thomas: Yeah, it’s funny when you try to put your own fandoms onto your kids. And it’s like, “Come on, this is really good!”
Max Brallier: Like, in the beginning, it works so much in whatever. But now it’s like, “No, we’re watching this one.” So we read stuff that was really silly and goofy and funny. And it was just so much fun to see what makes her laugh and stuff like that, like what things get her excited or made her like, “That’s weird!” so I wanted to try to write something that was goofy and silly in a way that was very different, but still within the same sort of universe.
Steve Thomas: Right, yeah, for all the fantasy elements, the regular series is more grounded, whereas this one, again, you have a zombie character, basically, that just takes off his hand and goes, “Whoop, oh, there we go!” It’s very funny, but it’s like, that wouldn’t happen in the regular series, because that just wouldn’t work. Do you find it hard sometimes to balance the general darkness of the setting that you have in the series, in the regular series, against keeping that light tone? Because you do touch on it every once in a while, you know that they miss their families and things, those keep coming up, but is it difficult ever for you to keep that tone, that balance, right?
Max Brallier: Always. I think that’s one of the harder things is finding the right balance and striking it always. Especially in the beginning, like the first book was a whole long process, going from when I had the idea to then getting it published because like a lot of the feedback I got from an agent and publishers was like the concept, the world is too sad for this fun narrator. I desperately wanted to publish the series, so, like, I went and I changed the whole thing and I made it a portal story. I went back and forth between like the end of the world version of their hometown and their actual hometown. It was much different. And I finished it forever and I was agonized over it and I didn’t like it, but it was done. And then I actually went the last minute, I went back and I said, basically, can I try that original version? I think I can make it work. Cause there’s thinking of like stuff that I know I loved growing up, movies like The Goonies, they’re being shot at, and there’s like 15 different times they almost die. There’s big stuff happening and I mean, every Disney movie opens up with some parent dying, you know? And so, I thought there was a way to balance it. So, yeah, it’s gotten harder as the series has gone on to balance trying to find like, okay, this is something that’s like this part is fun, action, adventure, this part is still relatable to a kid, this is like finding something like celebrating a birthday, but like doing it at the end of the world with just your friends, stuff like that, finding those things that are relatable touchstones and then twisting them and putting them in this end of the world, just your buddies situation, and also adding this monstrous element.
I think my favorite of all of them, if I just pulled it out was is the third book. I think that was the one where I best balanced those things. I often get to the end of the manuscript and I’m, like, it needs some sort of fun runner because it’s too dark or the other way around or it’s like a long stretch of just not feeling true to some version of how the characters would feel, because there is still a lot of heart in it. It’s not just like a silly “Yeah, we can do whatever we want!” Like that’s part of it, but it’s also how they’re dealing with it, and as we move on, that becomes kind of more evident. There’s more focus on finding their parents and who’s out there and all that stuff.
Steve Thomas: The food is still very much a, “We can do whatever we want” though. They’re always still just eating Cheetos and drinking whatever soda and whatever they want.
Max Brallier: Yeah, which has like backfired on me. I remember like maybe like six years ago, around book five doing school visits and being like, “And what do they do? First thing they do, they eat nothing but Cheetos and Hostess cupcakes and they play video games all day!” And then like, I wait for the kids be like, “Yeah, that’s great!” And they’re like, “That’s not really healthy. Like, that’s not good!” And I’m like, “What, what?” Kids are different these days, which is, yeah, it’s good to know that you probably shouldn’t do that. But I was like, “Even now I would do that.” But yeah, there’s things like that where I’m like, ” Yeah, you can just go and you can get every bag of chips mixed all together!” and they’re, like, “That’s too many carbs in one sitting.” That’s the one where it backfired on me, but yeah, food is fun. It’s also fun visually for gags and cutaway type jokes, where it’s like, this is like a monstrous meal, like this is what the monsters eat, you just have to eat it. They always kind of go back to that food well.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, I think you even have a joke in the newest one about that of like, “Oh, well, the kids of our generation like to eat healthy things,” but one of the villains is giving them something that looks healthy, but then it turns them into…
Max Brallier: oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I actually, yeah, I shone a light on it, whatever it’s called, lamp shaded it, because yeah, the kids, they’re eating some sort of weird pizza stuff that’s getting like turned into something else…
Steve Thomas: Turning them into barnacles or something, I think.
Max Brallier: Yeah, like weird monstrous sea creatures.
Steve Thomas: How did you get connected with Joshua Pruett who writes the comic spin off series?
Max Brallier: Josh was a writer on the Netflix series. That’s how I met him. We had like five, six writers on it. We became buddies and he became a sort of good go to person that would bounce ideas off of for the Last Kids books, like, “I’m stuck on this thing. Does this feel right?” And I always liked the way he’d think, there’s a lot of the same touchstones and he’s super, super, super into comics and he’s just fun to write with, so when I sort of started thinking about this, I was like, “This would be fun to do with somebody else” because the thing I least like about being a writer is all the time I spend alone writing. Oh, it’ll be great, we’ll just like sit in a room together and write. It’ll be like the Dick Van Dyke Show and it’ll be amazing. I live in L. A. and Josh lives in L. A. and so I was like, “Hey, let’s do this thing together since that’ll make it fun.”
I don’t know if I realized it at first, but it ended up there being a lot of moments where we were doing what the characters are doing, where it’s like, they’re sitting there together, writing together and being like, “Oh yeah, well, my character has this power. Oh wait, what if you make the bad guy look like this??” And we’ll be sitting there like, “Wait, dude, it’ll be awesome if the bad guy was like this!” And it’s like the exact same thing, which makes it there’s something in collaborating and writing a book about characters collaborating that makes it brings out a lot of that real stuff, and we had a feeling like, oh, we’re back in the fifth grade with our friends after school drawing and writing weird dialogue and making up rules for the characters’ powers and stuff like that. So it’s been super fun to be able to work with a friend.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and speaking of the Netflix series, there’s even a joke in the new book too of like how terrible it is that Netflix finds these great series and then cancels them right when they’re hitting their stride!
Max Brallier: I forgot we kept that in there. I think that was like a 4:00 AM joke. And we’re like, “Oh, we’ll type it and then we’ll get rid it at some point! But it’s still in there. Yeah. Yeah. I forgot we had that.
Steve Thomas: Oh well. Throughout the regular series and then even the framing sequences in the comic series, your regular artist collaborator Douglas Holgate, how did you first get connected with him with the series?
Max Brallier: I got really lucky that the Last Kids, the art director for the series at Penguin, Jim Hoover, who’s amazing. This is like over 10 years ago now, we had like our first lunch about this series when Penguin bought it, and he had a couple different portfolios with them, and one was Doug’s. Doug was just perfect. So I got lucky cause Jim’s really great, and Doug is just fantastic. He’s in Australia. So I think I’ve only hung out with him one time or two times. We were supposed to do a big tour, like for book six, which is Skeleton Road when they kind of go cross country road trip thing. So we were going to do like a road trip thing and that was the year that COVID hit, so we couldn’t do it. We were going to have like three weeks together, in the back of a monster truck, but it didn’t happen. Who knows how three weeks together in a bag of a truck would have gone, imagine like, that’s the end of the series! No, but he’s so awesome and so talented. He draws the monsters that are ridiculous and so cool looking, but then he also like, a lot of people can do that, not as good as him, but a lot of people can do that, but he draws jokes, humor. He makes jokes work visually in a way that is I’ve found not as easy to do as, I don’t know why you think it was easy, but, like, there’s something about it where it’s, like, you see in your head and, like, okay, this is how it works. No, like, it’s only funny if it’s a wide shot. That’s what makes it funny, and he just gets that stuff and he’s just so good at doing both. He’s beyond talented.
Steve Thomas: And do you work pretty collaboratively with him? A lot of times, the dialogue will continue into his art and then go back into the series. I don’t know if you’re suggesting those, or he’s suggesting them, or both?
Max Brallier: The way it works is I mean, the final product is very collaborative because, yeah, like you were saying, you can’t really like just pull the art out of it. I write a series called Eerie Elementary, and it’s a little bit younger and every page has a lot of art on it but the art’s there to support it’s like for helping reading. You know it’s like you’re seeing it and then you’re reading at the same time, but Last Kids is more like Wimpy Kid where it’s like the text is setting up a punchline or setting up like a big impactful moment or, there’s definitely images where it’s like, okay, I just want to see what’s happening because that’s going to look cool, so I write the manuscript and in the manuscript they put little these little boxes and I write sort of what I see in my head and I put dialogue and then Doug goes and he takes the dinky little things that I wrote for description, illustration ideas, and he makes them look amazing. And then he’ll also have ones where he’s like, “I think this scene should be illustrated. This will look cool illustrated.” Or I’ll run over cause on the second book, I realized I just kept being, “Illustration! Illustration! Illustration!” Because I read the first book and it looked really great. And I was like, “This is really good. I think the better part of this book is Doug’s drawings, not my writing.” I was like, “Let’s illustrate this part, illustrate this part, illustrate this part.” It was just too many illustrations, and afterwards, my editor was like, “We had to give him a new contract because you called for so many illustrations!” And so they’re like, “Here’s the limit, here’s the cap.” So I have to be much more picky about it. So he’ll be like, maybe this one, maybe we don’t do that one, and Jim will do that to the designer and my editor will kind of figure all that stuff out. So I have usually something in my head and then Doug takes that thing that’s in my head and makes it 15 times more amazing or draws something that’s way different than what I saw in my head, like a creature or a world, but always like 10 times more fantastic.
Steve Thomas: He’s got a great unique style too, I’m really impressed by, and it’s nice that he’s able to work with the Last Comic series as well, doing the framing sequences and then sets up the comic.
Max Brallier: Yeah, it’s important to have a sort of beginning and end part where it’s like, “Oh, here’s the kids in the real world and then we’re going to go into this, and those are sort of it’s like black, white, and it’s like a blue tint to it. And then it’s like, Wizard of Oz, sort of goes into the full color thing and then jump back out of it.
Steve Thomas: And I do really like the fake ads in the comics too.
Max Brallier: Writing those is like, I bought so many old comics for research and Josh would bring over these boxes of old comics, and I found all these great books that are just history of comic book ads, just full color. And then I also ended up researching like 15 different Sea Monkeys ads for the most recent one. And I was like, I miss Sea Monkeys. I want Sea Monkeys. I even ordered Sea Monkeys. We had Sea Monkeys going. I love that old stuff. It’s awesome. Writing those, like, some of the parts where I was like, this is so much fun, was doing the fake ads. I just love that stuff.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, I was going to mention the Sea Monkey one. I won’t ruin the joke for people who are going to read the book, but that was one of my favorite ones too. I think, probably just from when I was a kid reading the comics and seeing all those.
Max Brallier: No, we always save like the doing the fake ads for last because it’s like, okay, the book’s done. The story’s done. All right. And then we also have to figure out the layout of the book and see how many we need to fill up space and how many we can fit cause we wanted to do like at least six or so. So like, I remember doing that, that Sea Monkey one at the end of the last book, and it was like, we had like a sprint to finish the book and no sleep left. And it’s like, “Oh, right, I forgot, we’re supposed to do that that night.” And then figuring it out in like, middle of the night, which is just perfect time to write that. Cause it’s so weird and supposed to be so weird and bizarre and silly, and yeah, looking at it on one screen, looking at those old ads and playing with them. It’s fun.
Steve Thomas: And for all of you guys working on it a lot of self-referential humor too. Cause there was one like, “Oh, we could have this Max guy, he could write it. Oh look, he’s so handsome, but no, he shouldn’t do it!”
Max Brallier: Yeah, the part in the first book where you turn the page and yeah, they hit like sort of the low point at the end of act two before act three, and they’re stuck. They’re like, “We need help!” And then it’s like, “We could call this guy!” And it’s my big stupid author headshot, and then “No, not that guy! He has big ears! And then you turn the other page and it’s Doug but he’s upside down because he’s in Australia. I was like, this is my favorite thing I’ve ever written. This is so fun.
Steve Thomas: So the comic series is going to be four books. Is that right?
Max Brallier: Four to start. We finished the third one, the manuscript, and then it goes to Jay to start illustrating.
Steve Thomas: And you mentioned that the series is circling an endgame. Do you have any hints or anything for readers of how many more books you think there might be?
Max Brallier: I used to, but now I don’t anymore. The big arc that began in book five, this quest they’ve been on, there’s, I think about two more books in that. Then that’s going to close, and originally that was going to be the end of the series, but it’s getting harder to say goodbye to some of the stuff, but I don’t want to drag on that story. I don’t want it to get lousy. The most important thing is always like, I don’t want it to get bad. So if there’s a way for me to keep doing it, but still close out that story in a satisfying way, I would do that. So I’m sort of in a place of pondering right now. You caught me in like a moment of like, well, I don’t know what’s going on.
Steve Thomas: Right. But a couple more books at least there.
Max Brallier: Yeah, yeah, for sure. The big, big showdown is right around the corner.
Steve Thomas: And we’ll trust you to stick the landing there. No pressure or anything, right?
Max Brallier: Nothing’s worse than something that you enjoy for years as a fan and like it all falls apart.
Steve Thomas: All right, the new book is The Last Comics on Earth: Too Many Villains and it is available today, so go out and get a copy either purchase one or get one from your public library, or both, just do both.
Max, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Max Brallier: Thank you so much for having me.
Steve Thomas: Have a great day.
Circulating Ideas 