Max Brallier – The Last Kids on Earth and the Destructor’s Lair

Steve Thomas: Max, welcome to the podcast.

Max Brallier: Thanks for having me.

Steve Thomas: The new book is officially number 10 in the series, even though you’ve had some spin-offs and stuff in the middle of there, and it’s the 10th year since you’ve been having them come out, and there’s been all the spin-offs, there’s been a graphic novel adaptation, and animation and the most fun of all for me and for my son was the Mad Libs!

Max Brallier: That cracked me up. Yeah, my daughter’s eight and she’s just kind of gotten like really into Mad Libs recently. I was like, “If you think they’re cool, wait until you see this one.”

Steve Thomas: But all that to say, 10 years ago, did you ever expect Last Kids to be at this big epic scale?

Max Brallier: I was trying to think of some funny answer, but no, absolutely not at all. 10 years ago, I hoped that some kids might like this one book that I’d written and might find it. I never imagined that it would become really, the big focus of my life for a decade and now onward. I never imagined it would be part of readers’ lives for a decade, that I’d get to do an animated series for Netflix and make toys and a video game, all this stuff. Never, never, never, never. No. Absolutely not.

Steve Thomas: And has the story expanded in your mind? Like when you’re first writing it, you’re like, “Eh, maybe there’ll be three books and I’ll get that,” that you had a shorter way to wrap it up in case sales were not as huge as they were.

Max Brallier: I didn’t have any way to wrap it up at the beginning because I didn’t really think, I hadn’t really thought about it. As it went on, I started thinking about ways that I might want to wrap it up but always kind of knowing that that was always flexible. I was never like, “Two more books then I’m done with this thing!” Around probably book four, maybe five, I started to give it some more serious thought because the story itself was getting a little bit more serious with that book. Emotions were a little more heavy and it became more intense. So I started to think about that and had a loose idea of where it was going. Maybe a little bit more than loose, but a loose idea of how it might all come to completion. And I still have that and I’m working towards some sort of version of that, but it will not be the full ending. But it is gonna end, over the next two books, will end, some big things, some big arcs, some big storylines that have been going on for a long time.

Steve Thomas: Okay. And my son wanted me to make sure to ask you, “Will it continue on after…” like obviously at some point they will deal with Rezzoch, the main villain, “… well, can it keep going after that?”

Max Brallier: Yes. Yeah, and I have some ideas. I have a lot and I have notebooks and notebooks and note files and note files. At some point I may need to bounce them off your son to see if he thinks. “That’s terrible, Max!”

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, and I was asking him what he thinks is gonna happen at the end. He was like, “Oh, somebody will get sacrificed and they’ll get stuck in the Monster Dimension forever!” Well, we’ll see! There’s at least a couple more books left.

Max Brallier: I gotta hire this kid.

Steve Thomas: So before we get into the new book, can you give listeners who maybe don’t know a lot about the series, an overview of just what the conceit of the series is?

Max Brallier: Sure. So the Last Kids on Earth is about really one main, main character Jack. He’s in sixth grade when the story begins. He’s a foster child. He’s moved from place to place to place. He’s now in this town of Wakefield. And he has for the first time in his life, he has like a best, best, best friend Quint, who’s sort of a super genius gadget kid. And one normal day, they’re on their way to school, on the school bus, and they suddenly see huge portals opening up in the sky. And from those portals come giant monsters, Godzilla-sized monsters, regular-sized monsters, flying monsters, slithering monsters talking monsters, and also along with them is this zombie plague that begins to spread.

And so after some action, Jack gets back to his foster family’s tree house, discovers he’s the only one there, spends a few weeks too terrified to leave, finally ventures out, finds Quint still in town, and then teams up with classmate named Dirk and his friend June, and they discover that they really seem to be the only four people around who are not zombified or have been eaten by monsters. So they set out to kind of try to survive, but in a very fun way, almost like a Swiss Family Robinson way at times. And then the story builds and builds and more pieces are sort of unfolded and laid out and they learn what’s behind everything that’s happened, and Jack now plays a very large role in what’s gonna happen going forward. It’s a lot of thinking about, what if monsters and zombies took over the world, but we still have to go to the shopping mall? That’d be really fun. Like, what could we do? What if we found this old pickup truck here? We’re in sixth grade, but there’s a key in the ignition and no one’s gonna yell at us. Stuff like that.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And then as you said, there’s big long plot lines going on. I mentioned before defeating Rezzoch. That’s kind of like the big bad, main bad guy…

Max Brallier: yes. A big, big, big bad who’s over there in the Monster Dimension. So there’s other dimensions, and he’s still there and he keeps trying to get here to devour basically our world. And so the kids have been trying to prevent that as the series has gone on, but in the last book, Jack and Quint had to go to the Monster Dimension for the first time, and that’s where they still are when the new book begins.

Steve Thomas: Was that a fun new world to flesh out? You’ve talked about it, you know, throughout the series that the monsters would talk about how things were back home or whatever, but this is the first time that we’ve had a story set in that world.

Max Brallier: Yes, it was. It opened up a lot of like, a lot of what the fun of the series is imagining kind of everyday places, the shopping mall, school, Home Depot, downtown, Main Street, and what they would be like if the world ended and monsters kind of took over and began to inhabit them.

But with the Monster Dimension stories, the last book and the upcoming book, it was like, now it’s like imagining being like a 13-year-old kid with your best friend and suddenly you’re in a completely flipped, weird version of our world where there’s still some recognizable things. They’re able to hail a taxi at one point, but it’s like a giant hand with this vehicle on top. And so it, yeah, it allowed me just to think of, like, what’s the most monstrous, sort of alien, strange version of getting around someplace or going to like a Comic-Con thing, be like there, but what if it was for bounty hunters? Stuff like that.

Steve Thomas: And in this book, like you mentioned, it does primarily take place with Jack and Quint in the Monster Dimension and well, I guess Globlet will get mad if I don’t mention that they’re there, but can fans expect to find out what Dirk and June have been up to this whole time in between?

Max Brallier: Yes. Yes. So I’m actually outlining the next two books right now. I’m outlining ’em kind of as as one larger story, but I wanna make sure I know what’s gonna happen in the two as I begin, so it feels like one piece. And that’s one of the actual, the first things that people are gonna find out when we get to book 11.

Steve Thomas: Okay, great. Yeah. And you’ll have to read the new book to find out if Jack and Quint make it back, but we can still at least check in with Dirk and June.

Max Brallier: Yeah, we can still check in. I did have, at one point, there was a version, an earlier version of the last book where they were checking in via like a weird Monster Dimension used TV from like a used electronics shop, so there’s also different ways to have them check in, and then at the end I was like, I think we’re just gonna focus on Jack and Quint and use this adventure as an opportunity to really kind of dig a little bit deeper on their friendship.

Steve Thomas: Friendship has really, I think, been at the heart of a lot of the series, especially for Jack. I mean, the rest of them have their families and they miss their families, but Jack really doesn’t, like you said, doesn’t have a family that he likes. He has a foster family, but they don’t treat him well and he doesn’t like them. Do you feel like the dynamics of the series feels different for you as the writer when it’s just Jack and Quint together? The four of them together have sort of formed this team over the past 10 books, now it’s just been these two.

Max Brallier: It is very different. When I talk at schools or libraries or bookstores, I often get asked who my favorite character is, and my answer is always, I don’t really have one but my favorite thing to write is when it’s all four of them together and things are looking bad, but they’re still arguing with each other in the friend way, even as like, they look doomed for a moment. So I love writing all four of them together.

So when shifting the focus to just Jack and Quint and initially it was like, it felt like a real challenge. And it was a challenge for sure, but it was a fun one because we didn’t have the other two to play off of. It almost in some ways exaggerated them, their personality traits, each one kind of ballooned. And it allowed me to really spend a lot of time thinking about the series itself because the friendship thing is so core in it.

Jack’s very much like me. He’s the closest of any character I’ve ever written to just sort of what I’m like, not nearly as brave or funny, but the other stuff like the insecurities and use jokes to get out of situations and trying to escape from reality and the scary stuff. So yeah, it let me really make Jack and Quint look at what makes them friends, what it’s like when it’s just the two of them, and how they act differently. But there’s also offered new opportunities in that, to do new things that I hadn’t been able to really explore yet. It was a welcome challenge I guess.

Steve Thomas: Okay. Yeah. And again, I mentioned it earlier, but Globlet’s gonna get so mad that we haven’t mentioned that they’re around as well.

Max Brallier: Oh. So in the first, in the early drafts of book nine Monster Dimension, Globlet did not join them, and there was like a new character who was sort of guiding them through. I wrote that for months until I was like, there’s something that’s not quite working here. And I was like, I have an idea for this. And that really, in an instant changed the whole dynamic of the thing. It made it feel much more like a fun adventure as opposed to something that was like, the ticking clock was ticking so loudly that you couldn’t enjoy the world and the adventure itself. So Globlet was massively helpful there.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, major wacky sidekick energy there.

Max Brallier: Yes, exactly. Yeah. Which I love. I love that type of character, always saying the wrong thing or the weirdest thing possible, or acting in the strangest way possible. It’s like when I’m writing a scene or something, and there’s all the things that probably would make sense, that that should happen because this is what the characters would do. I can always be like, “Well, she would do the exact opposite of that.” And that makes it very fun, yeah.

Steve Thomas: Right. And can serve as that guide role, like you said, because that’s where she’s from so knows where everything is and everything and humor has been, you know, Globlet is a particularly funny character, but humor throughout the whole series, do you find the sometimes pretty dark moments and storylines difficult to balance?

Max Brallier: I do. I’m very aware of the balance, in trying to find the balance. I think some of the difficulty, and it comes from the whole series being written in first person from Jack’s perspective. It’s hard for the narrator to be funny when things look so bad for the future of our dimension and our world, but that’s sort of the way he deals with things when they get really scary.

The third book, Nightmare King, I remember that one was at first the toughest to figure out like, how do I balance, like, a forward narrative drive with a real threat, real danger. You want the pages to be turned. You want readers to want to turn the pages but also still get the fun of, “But hey, we can do anything we want to now because there’s no one around. You know, we can play ‘the streets are lava’ for real, jumping off like rooftops. We can act like Spider-Man.” And I think in the end, the third one I was very happy with the balance that I found there.

I’m always trying to find some sort of, like, fun runner thing that’s a part of the plot. Maybe it’s large in helping drive it, maybe it’s not but something that’s also relatable, like in book two, they have this, it’s a bestiary, but they call it a “beastiary,” and they’re collecting things and it feels like collecting cards, or in Doomsday Race, I was trying, that one was tough ’cause they’re stuck on this giant shopping mall on top of a huge monster’s back for the whole thing. And I was like, what can I find here that kids can relate to, where they can be like, “Oh, I get it. That’s like this world’s version of a birthday party or a first sleepover.” And then my editor had the idea to try turning this kind of fight for power aboard this mall society into the kid’s version of running for class president. And then I got to do all those “look at all those funny class president type tropes and make them monstrous, make them weird, make them different, make them elevated, hyper real.”

I love the challenge of trying to find the fun part and the funny part when there is so much danger and the stakes are so high.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And I think at this point in the series, I think you’ve gotten a lot of trust from readers ’cause there are some pretty intense moments in this newest book, especially toward the end, that you don’t want to throw humor in because then you’re gonna undercut it, so you want to keep having that…. I’m trying to avoid spoilers….

Max Brallier: Yeah. And I know you’re saying, and because so much of Jack’s personality is undercutting things a little bit in those moments, in the moments in the series when he doesn’t and he is a little bit speechless, I think those then become hopefully even more powerful and feel bigger. That, the part you’re talking about, was one of the hardest things in the series to write so far to get it right.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. So at the same time, there’s a spin-off series, the Last Comics on Earth. And that definitely sort of flips the whole thing that we just talked about where it’s almost, it’s mostly humor. Like the whole thing is supposed to be wacky and it’s almost like it’s this mirror image of the series where it’s taking the same kind of concept, but what if it was just wacky, silly middle school kids that wrote the series instead?

Max Brallier: Right, yeah. It’s like what if kids wrote the actual series itself? Yeah, the concept of that is it’s what Jack, June, Quentin, Dirk do when they’re in their tree fortress in between adventures. And they do the same thing that I did when I was a kid and they make comics with their friends and they imagine themselves as superheroes. And it’s this world called Apocalyptia where there’s all these neighborhoods that are each like different, bizarre possible ways that the whole world can end. Like there’s a Planet of the Apes style one, and there’s one where slime has taken over everything and now it’s a slime apocalypse.

It’s really just like, what’s the weirdest, funniest thing we can do in, like, a superhero format? I write it with my friend Josh Pruett, who was a writer. I met him ’cause he was a writer on the Last Kids on Earth animated series for Netflix when we were doing that, and we just sit around and talk about comics and movies and try as hard as we can to make each other laugh. And then the stuff that doesn’t make us laugh ends up being part of the Last Comics on Earth series.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And there’s lots of sight gags and it really is a lot like, I feel, like the comics that I made at that age too, of, “I don’t care that I can’t use this character ’cause it’s copyrighted. I’m gonna put ’em in there anyway!”

Max Brallier: The illustrator, Jay Cooper is, like, so brilliant. I remember in the first book and also into the second, Josh and I were really trying to like, “Jay, draw this gag and over the corner, there’s a vampire thing, so make sure we have one that has false teeth and all this stuff.” And then we realized, after we saw the completed first book, like, “Oh, we just need to shut up and like, tee him up for him to do just, like, to have fun.” Because everything that he draws, there’s more gags, more little sight gags. It’s like a Where’s Waldo? with a little bit of a narrative through it. It’s just like silly and funny. He’s so brilliant and he draws ’em really quickly, and it’s just incredible.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And in those books you and your regular illustrator collaborator, do, like, a framing sequence.

Max Brallier: Yes. So Doug Holgate does the main Last Kids on Earth series. So each Last Comics book begins with the kids in the treehouse or a comic book store drawing, and then we enter the thing that they’ve created, the comic book that they’ve created, and at the end we bring it back out. And it’s also a fun chance to kind of like, to joke, to comment on the stuff that I’m always thinking about with Last Kids, like, “How can I get outta this one? I can’t just have, it can’t just be a door that opens and then it’s an easy escape type thing.” And then in Last Comics, it’s like, “Oh, there’s an escape door!” Or, Last Kids, I’m always trying to give the villains sort of a voice that doesn’t just seem like the Emperor from Star Wars and then in Last Comics, it can be that. And then everybody comments on it and talks about how silly it is that they talk like that. It’s very fun. It’s a little bit cathartic sometimes.

Steve Thomas: And there’s three books in that series, and there’s gonna be a total of four, is that right?

Max Brallier: Yeah, the fourth one, it comes out in maybe six months, probably in like April or so. And that’s really fun. The bad guy in that one is obsessed with like doodling and drawing and he starts to steal kids’ drawings in order to use them to create like an ultimate sort of villain thing that’s undefeatable, unstoppable because in such a wonderful way, there’s no logic to kids’ doodles, you know? And because our heroes always figure out some way to stop the bad guys, the bad guy’s, like, “Well, if there’s no logic to these kids’ drawings and I bring them to life, then I’ll have an army of minions who can’t be defeated because there’s no button on the back you can smack and it shuts them down or something like that.” It’s very fun.

Steve Thomas: Very cool. And then, when you’re working with Doug, do you all work together to create the monsters? Like, you mentioned that with Jay, you just kind of set it loose. Do you set Doug loose quite a bit too?

Max Brallier: Yeah, as the series has gone on, I’ve done that certainly more and more and more, because like with the first book, specifically, I was really like, okay, I don’t know if I’m gonna get to do more than one of these. So I’m gonna make the big bad guy Blarg, I want him to be like, the thing that I would’ve thought and still think is like the coolest monster ever, because I knew that I could describe something and then this amazing illustrator, Doug, was gonna bring it to life, which is like, just so cool.

But as it’s gone on, I’ve sort of learned it took me probably embarrassingly too long that just the couple lines about what the creature needs to do, what its kind of purpose in that scene is, whether it’s preventing the characters from going somewhere or it’s going to be a scary thing and then becomes friendly later on, that what I’m gonna type is not nearly gonna be as cool as what Doug was gonna draw, so I just need to step aside.

Steve Thomas: That’s great that you’ve got a good relationship going on, as a series goes on, you can both kind of just trust each other.

Why do you think these kinds of post-apocalyptic stories are appealing to kids?

Max Brallier: Oh, I think about that different kind of versions of that question a lot. I think there’s a couple things. I think there’s something inherently fun about the idea of a world that you can kind of do anything and there’s no rules and there’s no one to yell at you and you can explore places that you otherwise couldn’t explore. You know, in the first book, the kids go into the teacher’s lounge, and it’s like, oh, we won’t be allowed to go here normally, and do all that stuff. Like starting from the beginning of the first book, Jack’s 13, but they drive a real big pickup truck because they can. So I think that there’s something very fun about that because, you know, our brains are well built enough that we can sort of push aside the sad parts of what would that would require and think about how fun it would be, especially like with your best buddies.

So I think that’s like a wish fulfillment, weird wish, but a wish fulfillment thing. I think it also allows, this is one of the things I really loved, and, you know, I was always daydreaming as a kid. I’d be stuck running errands with my parents and I would be at the grocery store and I’d be like, this is really boring, but it’d be cool if a monster exploded from the frozen food thing. So I can take those everyday places where kids spend lots of time and turn them into, make set pieces outta them, where instead of just walking from one place to another down the street, like you always do, they get to ride a giant worm.

So that’s one of the things I really like about it. And I hope that that’s sort of what readers are doing as well when you’re imagining yourself, you might be sitting there, going sledding or something and you’re hiking up the back up the hill and “I wish there was a better way to do this, something that was cooler.” And then in Last Kids on Earth, it would be there’s some monster at the top with the 300 foot tongue that unrolls, and then they can hang onto it. It gets pulled right back up. And so you get to look at the world that you live in and imagine a weirder, stranger, sometimes scarier, but often I think more fun version of it. I think that’s a big part of why kids like that end of the world, no rules thing.

Steve Thomas: What were some of the books and comics that you liked as a kid that you feel like are influences on your work today?

Max Brallier: Ooh. I’m trying to think of the ones that are influences too. I think Calvin and Hobbes usually just for how insightfully honest Calvin is about how the world works and how adults are, and the way things are, the rules behind, the reasons behind, the real reasons behind the things that we’re told we have to do, but we don’t know why.

Goosebumps was a huge, like, obviously like scary. It’s just, it’s a scary thing. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark was huge. The Bone series by Jeff Smith was, I think that was the first big epic adventure thing that I read. Because I didn’t read Lord of the Rings when I was a kid. I really loved movies, so I loved Star Wars and Indiana Jones, the Goonies, those classic ones and those were huge influences. But the first big, world trotting, epic quest thing that I read was Bone. And then it’s stuff like my favorite still, I just reread it with my daughter, is Sideways Stories from Wayside School because of just how funny and weird it is. Some of that definitely kind of creeps into Last Kids on Earth sometimes.

Steve Thomas: Well, beyond Last Kids, do you have any other projects coming up that fans should keep an eye out for?

Max Brallier: Let’s see. Well, within Last Kids, I have some things that coming up I’m really excited about. The next Last Comics book, the next two Last Kids books that I’m currently writing right now.

And then I write an early reader scary short story series called Mister Shivers. Each book is five very short stories, all with some sort of weird, creepy, unsettling twist. I love writing those. And the fifth one in that series just came out and we’re doing a kind of larger format, almost repackaged a version of that called The Dark, which will come out, probably nine months or so. And I’m working on a couple new ideas that I’m sort of fleshing out right now, I’m playing around with.

And then we adapted the first Last Kids on Earth book into a full color graphic novel, which was really fun. The second one is just about finished, and then after that we’re gonna dive into the third one.

And I’m forgetting something, but that’s kind of what I’m working on, what’s coming up.

Steve Thomas: Well, great. Like I said,my son definitely does not want you stopping the Last Kid series, so can you figure some way to keep the characters going?

Max Brallier: I think I have the thing that’s gonna make him happy. I hope.

Steve Thomas: Great. Yeah, absolutely. I told him, “You don’t actually want him to tell you the answer ’cause then it’s like gonna spoil the end!”

Max Brallier: Yeah. And it’d be too hard to even try to get it outta my brain to explain to somebody. That’s always the issue I had is that it’s now become so much sort of lore in there that I can’t try to like bounce an idea off my wife or something. It’s, like, there’s four people that I can talk to about this series, you know?

Steve Thomas: Right.

Max Brallier: Maybe five, maybe your son may need to be like a technical consultant or one of those things.

Steve Thomas: Bring him into the brain trust.

Max Brallier: Yes.

Steve Thomas: All right. Well, Max, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to the listeners, and of course, again, the book is The Last Kids on Earth and the Destructor’s Lair, and it will be out in early November.