Though humor and action are at the fore in the Bad Guys adventures, Blabey stressed the series’ equally important emotional core.

“He’s the kind of writer and illustrator that everyone can find something in, and find something to love.” This is something that kids really respond to.” Another thing she’s noticed is that Blabey’s work speaks to both boys and girls, and it spans age groups.

“They’re silly and they’re snarky but they still have so much heart to them.

“The humor just really gets at that seven- or eight-year-old kid,” Abramowitz said. From the moment we got them in, I was in my publisher’s office telling her that we had to publish these books in America.”īlabey’s tales have been attracting a readership via several appealing elements. “They’re the kind of books that you see and instantly know what they are, and you get so excited about them because they’re just so hilarious. “We work really closely with Scholastic Australia and we were watching the series for a long time,” she said. Book #4, The Bad Guys in Attack of the Zittens, arrives next month, and a fifth volume, The Bad Guys in Intergalactic Gas, is scheduled for January 2018.įor senior editor Jenne Abramowitz, who oversees the series in the U.S., it was love at first read. and Canada, across all of Scholastic’s channels. To date the books boast a combined total of more than one million copies in print in the U.S. The Bad Guys have enjoyed a warm reception in the States and have become an immediate hit. market this past January with Scholastic’s publication of The Bad Guys, quickly followed by The Bad Guys #2: The Bad Guys in Mission Unpluckable in March, and the May release of The Bad Guys #3: The Bad Guys in The Furball Strikes Back. The series, a top performer for Scholastic Australia since its 2015 debut, landed in the U.S. These elements collided one evening in my head and the Bad Guys were born. “And this happened to coincide with an impulse of mine to create a story about a group of misunderstood characters bonded together by the prejudice of others. “My boys were deeply interested in badass animals-I believe that’s the scientific term-like sharks and snakes,” Blabey said of his inspiration for the books. That’s one of the pillars upon which Blabey builds his comedy about a crew of notoriously scary animal pals (a wolf, a snake, a shark, and a piranha) who want to change their image. The “bad guys” who star in Australian author-illustrator Aaron Blabey’s fast-selling Bad Guys series of graphic novels for early readers aren’t really bad-they’re just misunderstood.

The bad guys book list