New Kid is the book that I wish that I had when I was a kid.
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Hi, I'm Jerry Craft, and I'm the author and
the illustrator of New Kid, an upcoming middle grade graphic novel.
Which is about a young boy, who's 12 years old,
named Jordan Banks, who loves nothing more to draw.
He lives in Washington Heights, which is a section of New York City.
And he wants to be an artist when he grows up.
However, his parents don't want him to be an artist because they don't think he can
make a living.
So each day, he ends up having to go from his community in Washington Heights
all the way up to the affluent community of Riverdale,
where he is actually one of the few kids of color.
So New Kid literally starts on the first day of school,
when his guide picks him up, and goes all the way through the end of school, June,
and follows his journey throughout the entire school year.
Now, I know that there are a lot of Jordan Banks out there in the world that have
never necessarily been represented.
I also feel that there are a lot of books for
kids of color that have amazing people, like Reneé Watson and
Eric Velasquez, that do a lot of historical fiction or things like that.
But I wanted to do something that had a little bit more humor to it.
I saw the way that my boys loved A Wimpy Kid when they were growing up, so I wanted
to do something with male characters that really was important, but really had
some humor to it also that I think I would have appreciated when I was 12 or 13.
There is a lot of me in Jordan Banks.
I did grow up in Washington Heights.
I was always one of the youngest and the smallest kids in the class.
I had curly hair at one time, believe it or not, light skin.
So I was the light-skinned kid in around my neighborhood in Washington Heights, but
then I was the African-American kid when I went to school in Riverdale.
I wanted to be an artist, but my parents sent me to a school in Riverdale, so
I would commute every day.
Which is really going from one world completely
to something I had only ever seen on TV.
And the other thing is that I turned around and did the same thing to my kids.
So my two sons, Jay and Aaron, went to a school in New Canaan,
Connecticut, which is equally as affluent.
So I really got a chance to witness this, first of all,
experience it as a kid and a student who is trying to
fit into a community that was not necessarily what he was born into.
And then watching my sons trying to do the same thing,
only it's much different now because of things like social media.
And some of the things that they were exposed to that I was not.
So this is like 30 years of research that went into this book, and
I think that is some of the things that I was able
to hone in on that I think has resonated with some of the early reviewers,
and we've gotten such great response as a result.
Because I was a reluctant reader, I really tried to
really push the visuals and the colors, and
I have a lot of interesting characters, both male and female, so
there's some cool boy characters, some cool girl characters.
My process for writing is I like to get the base coat down.
I like to have my beginning, middle, and end.
And ideally, I can take like six months or
a year to write because I always find little nuances.
My sons have been really instrumental because they'll say,
hey Dad, remember when I was in seventh grade and this happened?
I'm like, yeah, so put something like that.
When I do school visits, I do a lot of school visits,
I'm always listening to the dialogue and how kids relate.
I talk to a lot of teachers.
And whenever I do my school visits,
I always say to kids that you have two ears and one mouth.
That way you listen twice as much as you talk.
So I try to pick up on body language, nuances,
facial expressions, things like that.
As I take that, I just add more layers and
more layers and things like that, so it builds up.
The interests, the humor, and I probably read it 100 times.
My editor will tell you that every time I sent a new draft,
there were new jokes in there and new things where it's—hopefully he liked.
But I know he's happy with the end product.
So that's the writing process.
The drawing process,
I spent much more time with this than any project I've ever worked on.
I literally drew from 8 or
9 in the morning till about 2 o'clock in the morning, just about every night.
When I write, I need quiet, but when I draw, I can stream Netflix,
or watch the Knicks play, or something like that.
Because I work out of my house,
there really is no difference between a Monday or a Saturday.
I know certain things, because football is on on Sunday, so
if they ever put it on on Saturday, I'd really be confused.
But sometimes I don't leave the house for a week or two and, by the end,
I have the big Homer Simpson beard or end up looking like Tom Hanks in Castaway.
And then I look outside, make sure that the sun is still there, and
everything is functioning, and then I get back to work.
And then whenever I have a school visit, I shave and clean up again and
I'm back at it.
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