Yeah, so there’s — there have been 25 normal Pearls books, maybe more. So that’s just simply every strip that runs in the paper put together sequentially. And kids have always read those. I know because I do the book tours and I see who’s there and they’re always filling the front rows. So for me, I’ve never really seen a distinction. If you do a comic strip right and I don’t always succeed at this, I do fail sometimes, if you do it right, you should be able to do whatever you want without teaching the kids something he shouldn’t learn.
In other words, I heard Scott Adams say this once, and it’s really true, as long as the parent can just shrug and say I don’t know, you know what I mean? Like it’s a reference to something that if the kid doesn’t know, and the parent doesn’t tell him, he won’t get, then you’re bullet proof. So it has to work on two levels. Does that make sense? So I’ve always done that anyway, and I’ve never had a problem.
But my publisher wanted to do a series of Pearls books that was specifically for kids. So they’ve released these three books. I think the imprint is called Amp Kids or Amp for Kids and all they did was they went through, they took out some of the darker ones, which is weird because if you go to schools, kids are way darker than any adult audience I’ve ever been — if I ask for suggestions on Timmy, it’s oh, he gets killed by a blah blah, and then Corrina gets killed.
So they’re always much darker than you think, but anyways, they went through and they took out some of the dark stuff and then they took out cigarettes, sometimes even photo shopping them out, they took out beer and they took out swearing. But even the swearing’s not really swearing because it’s in a newspaper, so it’s just the little squiggles. So you probably could have left it as it was, but just to be safe they removed all that stuff. I’ve never seen myself as an adult author or a kid author.
Kids are — if you do that division in your head, kids are going to pick up on that right away. They’re going to know you’re talking down to them. Huge mistake. Write what makes you laugh and you will appeal to people of a certain sensibility whether they’re 10 or 50. Now maybe if they’re five, it’s too young. But I write what makes me laugh, and I don’t draw the distinction.