Hi, I’m Matt Holm and I’m the co-creator of the Babymouse and Squish series.
The true story of how Babymouse was born. Well, see Jenny was the only girl in a household with four brothers. So, she grew up reading a lot of boy comics her whole life. And she liked them a lot, but she really wished that there were better girl characters in comics, you know.
Most of them seemed to be running around in their underwear all the time as superheroes, you know, and she really didn’t identify with that, and so that was sort of stewing in the back of her mind. And then one day when she was in New York City working in advertising at the time she was having a bad day, as I’m sure many people in advertising do.
And she came home, and she was cranky, and everything had gone wrong that day, it was what we now think of as a typical Babymouse kind of day. And she said, “Right then, the image of this cranky little mouse popped into her head.” With, you know, a frown on her face, and her whiskers were messy, and had her hands on her hips. But she had a little heart on her dress.
So she was still cute. And she scribbled it down on a paper napkin, and the next time I saw her, because I was living in New York at that time too, she gave me the napkin, and she said, “We should do a book about this.” So I said, “Cool!” And then I took it home, and I did some sketches, and then I lost the napkin somewhere, so. [sighs] Yes, I lost the very first ever drawing of Babymouse.
So, after the initial sketch, we made kind of a day in the life of Babymouse pitch. Where it was about 50 pages long, Jenny wrote the whole manuscript out in storyboard format. And I did some key art for about a dozen pages throughout it. And we pitched that for about three years actually, after we came up with it, it took a long time. And no one was really making graphic novels for kids at the time, I think we kind of had to - we had to wait for the times to change.
Because in 2004 when we finally sold Babymouse to Random House that was when everything else was happening in comics too, you had Scholastic was picking up Bone from Jess Smith, and Raina Telgemeier was doing the Babysitters Club graphic novels. And so I think it was just something in the air then.
