Panels, Prose, and Other Superpowers, a guest post by Jarrett Pumphrey

I have a superpower. I make books for kids with my brother, Jerome. We’re a dynamic duo of sorts. Don’t ask me who’s the hero and who’s the sidekick. (Of course I’m the hero–I’m the older brother!) We just love what we do and feel incredibly lucky to do it. 

Building worlds for kids is one of the coolest superpowers you can have. Better than flying. Better than shooting lasers from your eyes. The stuff of Marvel and DC can’t come close. But this isn’t my first superpower. My origin story is one of heroic evolution.

When I was a kid, I had a different super ability. It wasn’t as cool as making books, but it was cool enough for a ten-year-old—I could run fast. In my head, I was The Flash or Quicksilver or that guy Berthold from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. I was a certain kind of hero back then—a speedster. And, boy, did I know it.

To make sure everyone else knew it, I ran everywhere I went. And I didn’t just run like a normal person, either. I ran with pure abandon so as to leave the evidence of my super speed in my wake. You know, like what happens with other speedsters. Those papers flying off the counter as I ran through the kitchen? “Sorry, Mom! My super speed did that!” That tidy pile of leaves exploding into a fall-colored flurry? “Sorry, Mr. Easton! I can’t hear what you’re yelling about your lawn, ‘cause I’m supersonic!” The hole in the wall because I couldn’t stop on a dime? “Sorry, Dad! It’s not my fault—I’m just too fast!”

Yep, I was a speedster, alright. That is, until I became a different kind of hero—a mountaineer. I was like Sir Edmond Hillary or Sylvetser Stalone in Cliffhanger. We didn’t have a lot of mountains in Houston, TX, where we grew up, but a house makes a good “mountain” in a pinch, especially a two-story house. Climbing the brick wall was easier than I expected and the gutter only bent a little bit when I dangled from it. The sprained ankle was a bummer, but at least I didn’t break anything, like my bones or my brothers down on the ground trying to catch me. Plus, I learned a valuable lesson: a parachute would have slowed my fall. I became yet another type of hero after that, one I thought was safer—a paratrooper. Our mom didn’t agree, though maybe it was just the ruined sheets.

And so it went, on and on, one kind of hero after the next. The same went for Jerome and our other two brothers, too. All heroes of one sort or another, but just barely. 

As a dad now myself, I feel for our poor parents, who were trying to build multiple businesses and raise a large family at the same time. They had to find a way to keep four boys with active imaginations—all out to save the world—from destroying the house and hurting themselves in the process.

It was a tall order. Almost as tall as those shelves out in the garage that we jumped off of that one time. We were stuntmen saving the day like Colt Seavers in The Fall Guy. We used the giant bags of packing peanuts our dad was storing for one of his businesses as our stunt bags. They lasted surprisingly long before they finally burst, sending tiny bits of Styrofoam everywhere. I think our dad would still be finding peanuts to this day if we hadn’t moved.

Jerome and I tapped into our early heroic adventures for our new book, Link + Hud: Heroes by a Hair. In a hybrid mix of panels and prose, we tell the story of Lincoln and Hudson Dupré, two brothers just like us. They like to think of themselves as heroes, just like we did. And their active imaginations tend to collide with the real world in epic fashion, just like ours did. When their busy parents bring on Ms. Joyce, an elderly, no-nonsense woman, to help look after the boys—just like our parents did—Link and Hud finally meet their match, their arch nemesis. We never got Ms. Joyce fired, though we spent plenty of timeouts in the bathroom. Will Link and Hud have better luck than we did?

Our primary goal was to make something fresh and fun. Something kids would want to pick up and read themselves. The sort of book we wanted to read as kids. So, we combined the powers of two mediums we love: comics and illustrated prose. In some chapters, we used graphic novel-style panels to capture the vivid and outsized imaginations of these two brothers. Their shared reality. In other chapters, we use illustrated prose to capture the real world. Actual reality. Some of the funniest moments in the book happen when we transition from one type of chapter to the other, one reality to the other. It leads to some pretty hilarious page turns and, we hope, the best sound in the world: kids laughing and giggling out loud.
I hope kids enjoy reading Link + Hud as much as we enjoyed making it. In truth, making books for kids is more super-privilege than superpower. It’s the coolest thing we’ve ever done, even cooler than that time we used dry ice and our mom’s shampoo to save the neighborhood from alien invasion, which was VERY cool…and messy, but that’s a story for another time.

Meet the author

Jarrett is an award-winning author-illustrator. He makes books for kids with his brother Jerome. Their books include It’s a Sign!, Somewhere in the Bayou, The Old Boat, and their author-illustrator debut, The Old Truck, which received seven starred reviews, was named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, and received the Ezra Jack Keats New Author Honor.

Jarrett spends his time writing and drawing in his home near Austin, TX, where he lives with his wife, their two boys, a dog named Whiskey, and another dog named Ford. When he’s not writing or drawing, you might find him fishing on a river somewhere or tinkering under the hood of his new old F100.

https://thepumphreybrothers.com/

https://www.instagram.com/jpumphrey/

Twitter @jpumphrey

About Link + Hud: Heroes by a Hair

Meet Link and Hud—brothers causing chaos in the first of a new middle grade series from real-life brothers Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey.

Lincoln and Hudson Dupré are brothers with what grown-ups call “active imaginations.” Link and Hud hunt for yetis in the Himalayas and battle orcs on epic quests. Unfortunately, their imaginary adventures wreak havoc in their real world. Dr. and Mrs. Dupré have tried every babysitter in the neighborhood and are at their wits’ end.

Enter Ms. Joyce. Strict and old-fashioned, she proves to be a formidable adversary. The boys don’t like her or her rules and decide she’s got to go. Through a series of escalating events—told as high-action comic panel sequences—the brothers conspire to undermine Ms. Joyce and get her fired. When they go so big that even Ms. Joyce can’t fix it, suddenly she’s out. Finally, success! Or is it?

With warm and authentic humor, Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey have blended prose and graphic novel-style illustrations to craft a unique and subversive new series full of brotherly mischief and mayhem.

ISBN-13: 9781324016090
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Publication date: 03/07/2023
Series: Link + Hud
Age Range: 8 – 12 Years

Filed under: Guest Post