Hey, I'm doing absolutely fantastic. How about you, Aaron, I'm great,
thank you. You know what I gotta tell you. I'm an adult,
a grown man, but your books, when I see them, I
become a child. I mean I literally light up like a child. That's
a beautiful government. Thank you. Ar The way that you write and the
way that the books are illustrated, it just blows me away because it takes
me to a place that nobody has ever been there. What is your magic
or your secret sauce? Look, I it's I write and draw things that
they're always like. I'm a movie fan, and they're always my version of
a cool movie that's playing in my head. And I'm trying to I'm trying
to dictate it and get it down, but it is. I write them
on one hand to entertain myself. But the bad guys it began, they're
really writing something from my son, who is youngest, who was he was
six at the time and didn't really like books, and I wanted to do
something that would capture his imagination and make him laugh. And that that's and
that that's It's just been my constant game with this has been figuring out how
to do that and because he liked them happily, it meant that an awful
lot of other kids seem to have liked them too, which is a really
an extraordinary situation to be in. I mean, we've just we're nearly at
fifty million books in print, which is insane. I just can't even begin
to process that. Well, let's look at the hook of this story.
Princess Beautiful as a celebrity cat turned outlaw. Her goal is to clear her
name. That's got my attention because we see this every day just by watching
television. Yeah, absolutely, it's like she and and the part of it
because I wanted to do a social media version of The Fugitive but with a
cat, and but it's just struck me as a really perfect opportunity to just
have fun with showing kids how quickly the internet can turn on you. And
I just seemed like a very rich seam of material to explore with four kids
in a way that is, you know, potentially you know, a nice
little cautionary tale and a really fun sort of format. But yeah, it's
it's a it's a strange time we live in, and I think it was
it just felt like the right time to put this in a in a story,
and because it exists in the same universe as the Bad Guys, they're
they're overlapping characters. It's a story that the kids can sort of kids can
sort of step straight into and know the world and just run with it.
So when when we talk about The Bad Guys, Mark barn is still talking
about his role in Bad Guys, I'm still talking about that movie. I
mean, the way that you bring things forward is just it's a masterminded work.
Thank you so much. I had I did. I did Mark's podcast
last year and we had a chat about all of those things. He was
just so good as mister Snake. Because that those those two characters, particularly
Wolf and Snake, I was I was actually asked, I've been working on
The Bad Guys for nine years and it had never occurred to me. Someone
asked me which bag guy you most like? And I went to give a,
you know, sort of glib answer, and then it hit me in
that moment that I am Wolf and Snake. I'm the positive and the negative
and my sub my subconscious had taken that part of me, split it into
and created these two characters, and that they mean so much to me.
Because of that, in many ways, it's sort of vaguely, weirdly autobiographical
that when two actors like Mark Marin and Sam Rockwell play them, it's just
it's it's it's you know. It's the greatest thing you can hope for as
a writer, I think, is to see your work adaptape, adapted in
such a spectacular way, but also to have it voiced and performed in such
a way that is just you know, hits the mark. You know when
it comes to shar in the story in this in this form that you do
because it's an action graphic but each and every one of these characters is it
because we can relate with it in the way of if I were to sit
down and doodle, these characters would be what would fall from my writing instrument.
Yeah, that's that's that's all. That's all. That's all. And
again, I say this all the time, but I really remain it.
I think there are a lot of illustrators out there who are infinitely more technically
skilled than I am, but it sort of doesn't matter. I think there's
a directness to the my silly illustration styles that just seems to work. And
I think it is that there's like a direct line from my brain to the
page, and I just try to stay out of the way of that and
get it down on the page as simply as I can and with as few
extraneous elements as possible. I just try to tell the story as simply and
as and make it as funny as it can be. You put focus on
social media fame. I thought that was very interesting and very much a connection
with all readers, no matter how old you are. Yeah, yeah,
absolutely, I don't. I personally don't do it. I try to flirtter
with it for a couple of years there, but I just I'm far too
sensitive for that to feel comfortable with it. But I just I've just been
watching my boys who are fifteen and eighteen now, and just watching them deal
with social media and just then love the whole world. And it's such a
slippy slope. It can just you know, it can it can. It
can turn so bad so far that look, and I don't think it's going
anywhere anytime soon. I think it'll probably only get more complicated. So it
struck me as something that even for young kids, because my books are from
sort for kids from six to twelve, roughly is the sort of the age
group. It just seems like a perfectly relevant and topical and interesting thing to
introduce in and I think it's something that they'll really dig as well, because
I mean, most kids these days just live within TikTok and snapchat and it's
just doing a book series where a character is central in that world. It
just seemed like a no brainer, really, and it wrote itself very easily
because of that. You know, there is a subliminal character inside this story,
and it's the color red. And I found myself just going and saying,
Okay, what's read in this one? What's read in this one?
What was the choice behind that? What happened? It's a good question,
And again I think it was more subconscious than anything else there was, just
because there's there's a certain level of unraveling mystery in this series, like in
the like in the old movie The Fugitive, where he's trying to figure out
who did this to him, it's the same with her, And it just
struck me as a good way to indicate clues and show things that kids could
then hold on too. And it would just allow me to highlight something in
the background that kids go, why has that been highlighted? M And it's
I'm trying to think of the red is like a little trail of breadcrumbs maybe
through the story that that might lead them to to what the ultimate reveal is
going to be. Because that's the thing. There's a number of characters in
the first books who you think are a certain way, but when you get
to the second book, you're going to discover maybe that they're not what you
thought. So I've been loving doing that. That's been really fun creating a
brand new series. I know what it's like to create a brand new podcast.
The ups, the downs, the questions, the doubts, you know,
the fears and things like that. What about you with creating a new
series, I have, Well, you know what, I think it's because
I have been I've been doing three to four books a year every year for
ten years, right, and The Bad Guys was a train that once you
got on it, it's two books a year, no matter what. So
that is just such a gigantic amount of work. And when I had the
idea for Cat on the Run, I thought, this is crazy trying to
do another book in the middle of all of this. But it seemed like
such a good idea that I thought I'm going to have to So basically what
I'm saying is, I'm so busy. I work like I work such long
hours to do these books that I didn't even really have time to stress about
it. It was just that's the idea, Samuel as the Bad Guys go,
and that's what I did. That's that's that's how I operate, and
it's and because I'm just currently in the process of finishing the last books,
the last Bad Guys in the last couple on the run, i am hitting
after a decade of working at that rate, I am heading towards having quite
a long break when you're so loyal like that to a project. Yes,
yesterday was the labor day. I forced myself not to do anything. What
do you go through or do you have those moments where you say no,
not today today, I'm all about just me enjoying life. Yeah, no,
that hasn't happened in a long time. But I'm I'm now, I'm
now about That's what I'm I'm very much looking forward to a time and I
can, I can, I can taste it. It's just around the corner
where I can, I can do that again, because again, you can
think each of these books, there's two hundred pages of illustrated content. I've
been in three years, it's six hundred pages of illustrated content. And the
year begins with a blank page, every year begins with nothing, and by
the end there's three finished books. So to do to do that is it's
been like I do like a roughly a ninety hour week, and and and
to to to consistently do that without any breaks for a decade, it's been
a lot. But it's it's so worth it because it's I think the last
I've just finished writing the last two Bad Guys books, and they're the most
satisfying things I've I've ever been part of. I love them so much.
So the fact that it is it is panned out the way that it has
is it's worth all of it. Writing the storyline of Princess Beautiful, that's
a switching characters from Bad Guys. Did you learn anything being her on this
go around? Oh that's a good question. Yeah, Look, I loved
She's She's actually one of my favorite characters I've created. I have to say
she's really fun because she's really complicated, she's quiet, she's quite a difficult
character. She can be. She has moments where she's quite obnoxious, but
she doesn't mean to be. She's just so. And there's this, and
again it's because it's very specific to this era of social media. She has
issues with narcissism and all of those things, but underneath there are hidden layers
that even she's not really aware of. And as the story goes on,
she finds herself discovering those hidden layers and hidden strengths and becoming a better Cats
as it goes along. And that has been really beautiful to create in a
genre because looks for six to twelve year old the characters, it's not often
that you get a character that goes on a reasonably complicated story arc, and
I love messing with the format of that a little bit. The Bad Guys
did the same thing generally for that age group. If you do a series,
the characters have a little adventure that they reboot in the next episode,
they just have a brand new adventure and they don't necessarily change much. My
character is because the story is always in on a cliffhanger. My characters tend
to go on big, long arcs, and I do love that because it
allows me to make them a little more complicated, which I personally love,
and I love reading that and seeing that in movies in the book. I
just I'm so proud of you for seeing yes to your creativity, because you're
touching people's lives out here. Please come back to this show anytime in the
future. Aaron, thank you so much. Er, Will you be brilliant
today? Okay, you two take care.