Halloween? No, BaseBALLoween!

Fuzzy BaseBALLoween, that is. My fifth Fuzzy Baseball book combines baseball with everyone’s favorite spooky holiday. Generally, baseball season only overlaps with Halloween halfway through the World Series. But I wanted the Fuzzies to play a team full of monster-ish characters, so I needed to come up with a premise to make that happen.

The book has a prologue where the fictionalized version of my editor demands that the next Fuzzy Baseball book be a holiday book. The fictionalized version of me pitches a number of holiday titles (Gobble Gobble Grounder…Ho-Ho Home Run… Kwanza Kurveball…) but he rejects them all, until as a last resort I pitch a Halloween book.

As the story begins the Fuzzies are at the World Series, but they are spectators, not participants. As soon as they express a desire to play one last game a bat in a tuxedo appears (Count Flappula) and offers them the opportunity to play a game against his team, the Graveyard Ghastlies, on Halloween night.

The Ghastlies are not monsters, but they are based on animals that are less than cuddly. There is an aye-aye, a fanged dear, and fanged toad, an Egyptian vulture, a great auk (extinct), and a naked mole-rat (clothed). There is also a werewolf, a ghostly walrus and a creature that is a polar bear/panda hybrid. When I illustrated their “team photo” I tried to emulate the cross hatching style of Edward Gorey. The name of the team, “Ghastlies”, is also an homage to Gorey.

In addition to the Ghastlies I created around 2 dozen ghouls and goblins in striped footy pajamas. Their design is inspired more by Tim Burton and Monster’s Inc than by Gorey. Their appearance represents a major plot twist in the story, so I don’t want to give that away here. But I will say this, if you want a celebration of Halloween that's more silly than spooky, you should check out Fuzzy Baseball #5: Fuzzy BaseBALLoween.

Fuzzy Baseball #4: Di-NO Hitters

My fourth Fuzzy Baseball graphic novel is Di-NO Hitters. I was excited to create a team consisting of dinosaurs and pterasaurs, the Triassic Park Titans. It was my first book with dinosaur characters since my debut picture book (as author and illustrator) Dinosaur Train.

I really wanted to have fun with the size difference between the two teams and play with the scale. Some members of the Triassic Park Titans are so large they don’t even fit on the pages! Is it necessarily an advantage to be so oversized in baseball? What are the pros and cons?

 

And, to develop that concept further, to get into position Hammy Sosa, the Fuzzies’ catcher, needs to climb up on various size ladders. 

I also wanted to play with the idea that the dinosaurs are from a different time period. Their uniforms are extremely vintage, and there is a debate among the Fuzzies as to whether or not the Titans have kept up with the current developments of the game. Are they too “old school”? Or are they masters of certain fundamentals that haven’t changed with time?

One of the challenges in depicting dinosaurs in a book, (even in a comedic, non-fiction book) is that the scientific understanding of them always seems to be changing. Were they fast or slow? How many of them had feathers? What colors were they? In order to head off any such criticisms, I invented an antagonist, Professor Rufus DeTerrier. The professor keeps interrupting the story pointing out inaccuracies. As the author, I insert myself into the story to remind him that this is an imaginative work of non-fiction, and, as such, I am not obligated to be scientifically accurate in how I depict my characters.

  

  

 Fuzzy Baseball #3: R.B.I. Hitters

It looks like I haven’t posted anything here in almost 4 years (I thought it was longer!) so I’ll try to catch up, a little bit at a time. Since my last post I’ve created two more Fuzzy Baseball books. Fuzzy Baseball #3: R.B.I. Robots and Fuzzy Baseball #4: DiNO Hitters, and Fuzzy Baseball Triple Play, which consists of books #1-3. And, I just delivered all of the artwork to Papercutz for Fuzzy Baseball #5: Fuzzy BaseBALLoween, which is due to be published in August of 2023. I’ll take this opportunity to write a little bit about R.B.I. Robots.

I wanted the Fuzzies to play a team full of robots, the Geartown Clankees. Designing the characters was particularly challenging. Typically, our image of a robot is a machine made to look human. But in the “universe” of Fuzzy Baseball, all of the characters are anthropomorphic (human-looking) animals, so the robots in the story need to look like mechanical anthropomorphic animals, rather than mechanical humans. And if that wasn’t complicated enough, when the Clankees arrive they are wearing animal disguises, to try to hide their robot identities. So, I needed to design the characters and their disguises. 

Soon after the game begins it is revealed that the Clankees are robots. The Fuzzies are concerned that it won’t be a fair game because the robots will be too powerful. The robots explain that they are calibrated so that they can play as only well as organic life forms… but no better. 

After the umps consult the rule book (there are no rules against robots) it is determined that the game can continue, but the robots are not allowed to recharge during the game. The Fuzzies realize that if they just keep playing their best they can outlast the robots and win.

One of the challenges I have with this series is that I don’t want to always make the opposing team the villains. These robots are very kind. They are playing baseball to experience the joy and comradery of teamwork. But, if it’s not a “Good Guys versus Bad Guys” situation I still need to give the readers something to care about. I decided that Blossom Honey-Possum would have an irrational,  lifelong fear of robots. Manager Bo Grizzley lets her sit out the game, but her services might be needed if they go into extra innings (spoiler alert: they do… 38!).

Another twist is that Hammy Sosa is trying to plug his own graphic novel, Pigtown Detective. It’s an action packed story about a hard-boiled detective named Spam Spade. The reader gets a few pages of this pretend graphic novel interspersed within the pages of R.B.I. Robots.

A spread from Pigtown Detective

Fuzzy Baseball #3: R.B.I. Robots is published by Papercutz and is available from Amazon, or from your favorite local bookstore.