‘THE LAST KIDS ON EARTH’ SERIES REACHES ONE MILLION COPIES IN PRINT AND IS OPTIONED FOR TELEVISION
Atomic Cartoons to adapt New York Times bestselling series for TV, The Last Kids on Earth and the Nightmare King hits bookshelves today
Max Brallier’s New York Times bestselling The Last Kids on Earth series reaches a groundbreaking 1 million copies in print with the release of the third book, The Last Kids on Earth and the Nightmare King from Viking, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers. This comes on the heels of Thunderbird Entertainment’s announcement that their Emmy Award-nominated animation studio Atomic Cartoons has optioned the rights to bring the series to screens everywhere. Filled with wisecracking kids, crazy gadgets, and a lifetime supply of zombies and giant-sized monsters, The Last Kids on Earth is has been described as Diary of a Wimpy Kid meets The Walking Dead.
Brallier is on board as executive producer and writer for the animated series, alongside Atomic Cartoon’s Jennifer McCarren and Matthew Berkowitz. Thunderbird Entertainment is a rapidly growing Vancouver-based multiplatform entertainment company with offices in Los Angeles, Toronto and London. Thunderbird’s most recent projects include the upcoming Blade Runner 2049 starring Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford, hit Canadian comedy Kim’s Convenience and the animated Netflix original series Beat Bugs, featuring reimagined songs from the Beatles catalogue featuring artists such as Sia, Eddie Vedder and P!nk.
A rich blend of humor with illustrations by Australian comic artist Douglas Holgate, The Last Kids on Earth has received three starred reviews and was called ‘Terrifyingly fun’ by Jeff Kinney, author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Diary of a Wimpy Kid. With sales of each book increasing exponentially every year, the series draws even the most reluctant readers in with its ‘likable cast, lots of adventure, and gooey, oozy monster slime galore’ (Booklist). The Last Kids on Earth is quickly becoming the next big series to watch with at least two more books still to come.
Max Brallier is a renaissance man in children’s book world, with a keen ear for writing pitch perfect middle grade voice. Before he was a New York Times bestselling author, he worked in marketing at St. Martin’s Press, and developed adventure games for the website Poptropica, a virtual world of games for kids with millions of users per day. He has also written for Cartoon Network licensed properties including Adventure Time, Regular Show and Uncle Grampa. With The Last Kids on Earth Brallier takes his talents to the written page, where the main characters are independent, geeky, zombie fighters that are ‘hilarious and full of heart’ (Boys’ Life).
Inspired by spending his own childhood reading in his backyard treehouse, Brallier’s main character Jack Sullivan and his squad of friends reside in a tricked-out treehouse of their own after a monster-zombie apocalypse hits town. Along the way they encounter friendly monsters (and some evil ones too), treating life like a video game by imagining obstacles as feats. Brallier observes that children often think this way too, whether it’s fear of a test in school or gathering confidence to raise your hand to ask a question in class. “Kids really respond to Jack’s confidence and slightly self-deprecating voice,” Brallier says. “It means so much to me to see the dog-earred pages of my books and connect with the kids who can’t wait to hear how the series will end.”
This September Brallier will visit over 8,000 students in schools across the country on a national tour. Penguin met the excitement with a robust marketing and advertising campaign with over 50 million impressions, and gave readers an opportunity to be entered in the acknowledgements of the next Last Kids on Earth title, releasing in 2018.
Max Brallier is the New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty books and games, including the middle-grade series The Last Kids on Earth. Under the pen name Jack Chabert, Max is the creator of the Eerie Elementary series for Scholastic Books and author of the New York Times bestselling graphic novel Poptropica: Mystery of the Map. He is the creator of Galactic Hot Dogs, a middle-grade adventure series, and has written books for properties including LEGO, Adventure Time, Regular Show, and Steven Universe. Max has written for adults, including the pick-your-own-path series Can YOU Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? and an entry in the zombie anthology Nights of the Living Dead. In the olden days, Max was a game designer for the virtual world Poptropica and worked in marketing at St. Martin’s Press. Max lives in New York with his wife, Alyse, and daughter Lila.
Douglas Holgate has been a freelance comic book artist and illustrator based in Melbourne, Australia for more than ten years. Douglas has illustrated comics for Image, Dynamite, Abrams, and Penguin Random House.
Penguin Random House is the world’s most global trade book publisher. It was formed on July 1, 2013, upon the completion of an agreement between Bertelsmann and Pearson to merge their respective trade publishing companies, Random House and Penguin, with the parent companies owning 53% and 47%, respectively. Penguin Random House comprises the adult and children’s fiction and nonfiction print and digital trade book publishing businesses of Penguin and Random House in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa, and Penguin’s trade publishing activity in Asia and Brazil; DK worldwide; and Penguin Random House Group Editorial’s Spanish-language companies in Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, and Chile. Penguin Random House employs more than 10,000 people globally across almost 250 editorially and creatively independent imprints and publishing houses that collectively publish more than 15,000 new titles annually. Its publishing lists include more than 70 Nobel Prize laureates and hundreds of the world’s most widely read authors.
