Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of My Dream Gig

A little over a month ago I talked about asking other artists what book, given the chance to do any, they would love to adapt for comics. I mentioned my interest in the possibility of The Invisible Man, The Jungle Book, etc. Then a week or so later when asking for sketch suggestions, my friend Ty Buttars reminded me of Encyclopedia Brown. As a kid, I was crazy about Sobol's Sherlock in sneakers. I had a small collection of the first 8 or 9 books, the older ones with all the great illustrations by Leonard Shortall. I'm not sure where they came from, my Dad may have held onto them. I'd mostly forgotten about them as the years went on until the Children's Literature class I took in college. When asked which books I most enjoyed as a kid, I remembered Encyclopedia Brown. I went and checked out a couple of the old books from the Children's Education Center and immediately the joy of those books came back to me. I had thought about how cool it would be to adapt those books to comics, similar to what the great Raina Telgemeier was doing with the Babysitter's Club books at the time. Again, through the end of college and life after, I had forgotten about this.

That was until Ty reminded me about this dream gig. To my knowledge, this hasn't been done yet, but just think of how awesome it could be. This is right on the crosshairs of the kind of projects I've always wanted to work on. I'll go so far as to say this is one of those things I have to accomplish in my lifetime. From what I could tell, Bantam has the publishing rights to ol' EB. Granted, I'm not exactly knowledgeable as to how things work in the publishing business, but here's an open plea:

Whoever happens to be reading this, if you're from Bantam or know somebody at Bantam, I just want to throw this idea out there. To the point where as often as I can over the next couple of months I'll be working on a few samples for this. Again, I realize this isn't how things are done, but I don't know any better. The above image is a mock cover I made tonight, just fooling around with the idea. I've got a couple ideas for other covers, which hopefully I can get around to soon.

I've been trying to track down the original prints for the first couple of books, and already managed to find the first one (Boy Detective). I thought about doing one of those contests like Sean Galloway does from time to time where if you guys can find me some of the books you'll win a drawing or something. We'll see.

Anyway, thanks for putting up with me while I go on forever about this. And if this sounds cool to you let me know, and spread the word.