The time-traveling, literary adventures of a 5 month old baby girl named Sprout
A friend and former colleague was running the Blog over at Waterstones.com. Rather than just reprinting press releases from publishing houses, he was keen to start publishing original content. He asked me if I wanted to do a weekly comic strip. My daughter was then 5 months old and I loved drawing her. Her “in utero” nickname had been “Sprout.” In a fit of inspiration/madness, this was the idea I came up with:
A wormhole has opened up in space time allowing time travel.
The great authors of the past — concerned about posterity — to travel to the present day to pitch themselves and their work to the readership of the future: a five-month-old baby girl named Sprout.
Sprout’s Bookclub ran on the pages of the Waterstones Blog from 2012 to 2015.
Strange Bedfellows
Sprout meets a fascinating cross section of characters on her literary adventures. See a selection of them below.
If you’d like to buy a poster of the time Sprout met Ernest Hemingway, click here.
If you fancy a poster of the time Sprout helped Stan Lee and Jack Kirby bury the Marvel hatchet, click here.
Read the first 9 strips below
Find out how the time traveling, visits from writers of long ago and Sprout’s literary adventures began. If you’re on a mobile device, you might need to turn it 90 degrees.
Week 1: The wormhole appears
Week 2: Hemingway Arrives
Week 3: On habits
Week 4: James Joyce and Smut
Week 5: Joyce and Hemingway bump into each other.
Week 6: Joyce reads to Sprout
Week 1: The Wormhole
Week 7: Alan Moore arrives
Week 8: Alan Moore meets his audience
Sprout’s dreams are wild after her visits from Ernest Hemingway, Bram Stoker, Alan Moore, Herman Melville and one of Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things…
This is what the strip looked like on the pages of the Waterstones blog.
The Real Sprout (AKA my daughter Aurelia) reading about her adventures in the pages of the her trade paper back collection.