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.