Last week’s books releases saw two blockbusters going head to head: George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, and Wimpy Kid #5: The Ugly Truth. In the end, it was no contest: Wimpy Kid outsold Dubya 2 to 1, the Washington Post reports. Jeff Kinney’s confused middle-schooler sold nearly 375,000 copies in one day.
And yes, we know that Wimpy Kid isn’t really a comic book, but you know what we say — don’t distance yourself from success!
I’m still 1,000% missing why Kinney’s work doesn’t qualify as comics for purists. Yeah, a lot of the book is driven by prose, but the way the text plays off the cartoons is integral to anyone’s understanding of what the book and the character are all about.
What is it that makes this “not really comics”? Is it that there are fewer sequential panels? Can someone please explain this to me, because I hear it all the time and have yet to find convincing evidence, and I’ve read almost all of Kinney’s books.
Looks like a comic to me Kiel!
There’s no reason why other comic books shouldn’t be getting these kind of numbers… aside from the fact they’re not getting distributed into the hands of people who could want them.
M.Kitchen: As much as I’d love to agree with you, there are few comics that are as funny, specifically to the interests of Elementary school kids and the crap they go through as the Wimpy Kid series.
Actually if we qualify many of those Cerebus issues that just had images with prose as comics, why not Wimpy Kid?
And that Ryan North book just bumped Glenn Beck’s book out of the No. 1 spot on Amazon… funny how things clump together like that sometimes.