Everyone Loves Bacon

This is the origin story of how I became the illustrator of #EveryoneLovesBacon.

Two years ago, I contributed a short story to Comic Squad: Recess (Random House) about a cupcake with superpowers named Jiminy Sprinkles. I posted this image on Facebook to tell my friends about it:

Kelly saw it, which prompted this conversation:

To fill in the parts that didn’t happen on Facebook, I created two sample drawings (here and here) which I sent to my agent, Steven Malk. They worked their magic, and as you can see in our conversation, about two weeks later I was officially the illustrator of #EveryoneLovesBacon.

Full disclosure, this is not typically how it works in children’s publishing. But it helped that Kelly and I happen to share the same agent. Plus, Kelly is a total rockstar. 

A couple of years ago I was researching zombie material for my ZOMBIE IN LOVE book series and I came across an odd pairing of zombie and bacon merchandise on a website. After perusing all of the weird items like bacon-flavored toothpaste and soda pop and candy, I said to myself, "What's up with bacon? Everyone loves bacon. Wait a minute... Everyone Loves Bacon!" I wondered why in the midst of this insane bacon craze nobody had ever thought to write a bacon picture book before.

When the manuscript was completed I emailed it to my agent with a simple note: 

"This is quite possibly the best AND the worst story I have ever written. I have no idea what you're going to say..."  

My agent is a vegetarian. Fortunately, even he loved Bacon. 

When I first read Kelly’s manuscript, there were so many laugh-out-loud moments. One of my favorites was, “Bacon drove fancy cars.” There was no way I could resist sketching what that might look like, so I included it with my submission to sweeten my chances of becoming the book’s illustrator. I figured even if I didn’t get the Bacon gig, I could cross drawing “a piece of bacon driving a convertible” off my illustration bucket list.

The final spread looks vastly different, but this is still one of my favorite drawings created while making the book.   

This was my first drawing of Bacon for the book, Everyone Loves Bacon. Because the competition to illustrate this book was fierce, I created this sample to increase my odds of winning the gig. It worked! The style of his eyes changed in the final book, but you’ll notice he’s still firing his finger guns.