BIG NATE

BIG NATE is following in the Wimpy Kid’s wimpsteps and vice versa. Drawing in a simple wooden style — much like Scott Adams in Dilbert but somewhat larger and with fatter lines — Lincoln Peirce created his comic strip about middle schooler Nate Wright in the early 1990s and got it syndicated in 1991 by United Media. With his distinctive multi-cone hairdo, Nate is a self-described genius, the syndicate publicity says: equipped with only his hairdo, a No. 2 pencil and the unshakable belief that he is destined for greatness, “he fights a daily battle against overzealous teachers, undercooked cafeteria food and all-around conventionality.” Although it runs today in about 200 newspapers, Big Nate is not what the average citizen would call a roaring success. Until the Wimpy Kid books came along and showed just how to make a fortune with simple wooden-stiff artwork.

Last March, HarperCollins Children’s Books launched the first of a six-book series starring Peirce’s character: Big Nate: In a Class by Himself. At least two other titles have been released: Big Nate Strikes Again and Big Nate From the Top. The first two are more-or-less original effusions for the books; the third title begins to exploit the fertile ground of reprints, harvesting its content from the strip’s 20-year inventory. This could go on forever, or at least to within a couple months of infinity.

These volumes are obvious attempts to cash in on the Wimpy Kid Phenomenon. And a certain perverse poetic justice lurks therein. Jeff Kinney, the Wimpy creator, was a big fan of Big Nate, saying: “Lincoln Peirce is one of my cartooning heroes, and Big Nate ranks as a comics classic. Year in and year out, Big Nate is among the best comics on the funnies page.” When Kinney was an undergraduate at the University of Maryland (from whence cometh Frank Cho and Aaron McGruder — the place is a hothouse of cartooning talent), he wrote to the Baltimore Sun, calling Peirce’s strip “the best of the new generation of cartoons that make the comics page worth reading.”

Is it, then, too much to suppose that Kinney, after realizing he would probably not become a political cartoonist, stared at Peirce’s “comics classic” and said to himself: “I could do that.” And did, creating the first of the Wimpy wonders.