So, each one of these books takes so much research. And I’m jealous of authors because they can just research and then type. They can say the soldiers went to war and they had helmets and boots on. Done. But if you’re the artist, if you’re showing all of this stuff, well you can type that out, but you also have to show the boots, you have to show the helmets. So I’m double research because not only do I have to find all of the written research, which is very rigorously checked by our fact checker at Abrams, who really gives me a difficult time, very good at their job, catches single thing, makes me fix everything. But then I have to find all of the visual elements.
And some of those things are harder than others. Revolutionary War is not the hardest because those uniforms were kind of mismatched and all over the place, people were piecing stuff together. We don’t have photos, we have some oil paintings, we have some etchings, but you get a little bit of freebie on getting things exactly right on the uniforms and the weapons. Now the Civil War, that’s another story, and you get children whose parents are re-enactors, and they are there counting the sergeant stripes on sleeves, and things, and saying, “Oh wait, no, no, no. This Illinois Regiment did not have those pants.” So it’s a lot of careful, careful research.
And I’ve made a game out of the research for the readers because I know things will always change. We’re always going to get things wrong. History – they’re always making new discoveries. So, in order to make the research, really, more part of the fun of the book, I made up a fictional team of researchers. So when you get to the back of the book you see the bibliography, and it said this — “Everything in this book was researched by babies.” I did this as a joke in the first book, just thinking, what’s something that people — If they’re writing a review online, and they say “This research is terrible.” And they say, “Well, it’s done by babies.”
And the kids who read that first book really liked those cute little babies, they’re crawling all around in the bibliography, they’re complaining. So it’s a little team of babies that do the research. I draw them in the back. They’re called the research babies and they’ve kind of become a character in their own right.
And there’s also a Corrections Baby, who runs the Corrections Department, and if you find something that’s wrong I’ve got an email right there, and you can send the Correction Baby that information, and then hopefully in future editions we’ll fix that. For example, in my most recent “Lafayette” book we transposed, we turned — we swapped 1780 for 1870, just, you know, a little something that the proofreader didn’t catch, and a million kids were so excited. They’re like “We found it!”
There’s a lot of very detail-oriented kids that really want things to be right, but I think that they like knowing, hey, well, if I found something that’s wrong that’s exciting, let’s fix it, and they send it in. So, yeah, the books are researched by babies. And I make the research part of the book. The bibliography, in a lot of cases, is a comic. So you’re seeing the books as little comic drawn things.
I think it’s an important part of the whole book to show all of that research. And then of course behind the Research Babies we have lots of bibliography — or lots of photos of the, of the events, and people from the book. I think a lot of kids actually jump in, as he’s reading it, just thinking it’s going to be a fun, wacky adventure, and they get to those final pages, and go, “This was real? I don’t believe it!” And I think — hopefully for them it’s an exciting moment of realizing how exciting the history and the research is.