About this item
Dog Man meets Big Nate in HILO-the hilarious, intergalactic, action-packed New York Times Bestselling GRAPHIC NOVEL SERIES kids love! "A Total BLAST," says the Miami Herald!BOOM! CLANG! CRASH! D.J. and Gina are totally ordinary kids. But Hilo isn't! Hilo just fell out of the sky and doesn't know where he came from, or what he's doing on Earth. (Or why going to school in only your underwear is a BAD idea!) . . . But UH-OH, what if Hilo wasn't the only thing to fall to our planet? Can the trio unlock the secrets of Hilo's past? Can Hilo SURVIVE a day at school? Find out in HILO-a laugh-out-loud, epic story of friendship! Adventure! (And the occasionaly mutant space robot) . Here's what people (and robots!) are saying about Hilo!* Children's Choice 5th-6th Grade Book of the Year!* Nominated for multiple State Awards - including the Pennsylvania's Young Reader's Choice Award!"More giant robotic ants and people going 'Aaaah!' than in the complete works of Jane Austen" - Neil Gaiman, bestselling author"Every kid would love a pal like HILO, and every kid will love this book!" - Lincoln Peirce, bestselling author of the Big Nate series"HILO is delightful, silly, tender, and most importantly: funny." - Jeff Smith, bestselling author of the Bone series"Fast paced, furiously funny, and will have kids waiting on the edge of their seats for more." - Jeffrey Brown, bestselling author of Jedi Academy"A perfect book for any kid who ever needed a friend and then had one with superpowers fall from space." - Seth Meyers, actor, comedian and writer* "A wholeheartedly weird and wonderful tale of friendship, acceptance, and robots." - Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review * "A must-have." - School Library Journal, Starred Review"Good clean laser-beams-coming-outta-your-hands fun for the whole family." - http://blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/ "A story that can be enjoyed by the entire family." - The New York Times"My students are obsessed with this series. OBSESSED!" - Colby Sharp, teacher, blogger, and co-founder of Nerdy Bookclub
About the Author
Born February 12th, 1970 and raised on Long Island in New York, Judd began cartooning professionally at 16 with a single-paneled strip called Nuts & Bolts. This ran weekly through Anton Publications, a newspaper publisher that produced town papers in the Tri state area. He was paid 10 dollars a week. In August of 1988, Judd began attending the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor bringing Nuts & Bolts with him, but turning it into a four-panel strip and creating a cast of characters to tell his tales. Nuts & Bolts ran in The Michigan Daily 5 days a week from my freshman year (freshperson, or first-year student, as they liked to say at U of M) , until graduation in the spring of 1992. A collection of those college years Nuts & Bolts was published in Ann Arbor. Watching the Spin-Cycle: the Nuts & Bolts collection had a small run of a thousand books a couple of months before graduation. They sold out in about 2 weeks and there are no plans to republish it. Before graduation he accepted a development deal with a major syndicate (syndicates are the major league baseball of comic strips. They act as an agent or broker and sell comic strips to newspapers) . Judd spent the next year living in Boston, and developing his strip. The bottom dropped out when the syndicate decided that they were not going to pursue Nuts and Bolts for syndication and were terminating his development contract. Crushed and almost broke, he moved back in with his parents in July 1993. Getting by doing spot illustration jobs, Judd actually had Nuts & Bolts in development with Nickelodeon as an animated series. At one point he even turned the human characters into mice (Young Urban Mice and Rat Race were the working titles) .In August of 1993 he saw an ad on MTV for The Real World III, San Francisco. For those who may not know, The Real World is a real-life documentary soap opera, where 7 strangers from around the country are put up in a house and filmed for six months. You get free rent, free moving costs, you get to live in San Francisco, and get to be a famous pig on television. The "Audition process," was everything from doing a video, to filling out a 15 page application, to in-person interviews with the producers, to being followed around and filmed for a day. 6 months and 6 "levels" later, Judd was in.On February 12th 1993, he moved into a house on Russian Hill and they began filming. Along the way Nuts & Bolts was given a weekly spot in the San Francisco Examiner. This WHOLE deal was filmed and aired for the show.They moved out in June of 1994, a couple of days after O.J.'s Bronco chase in L.A. The show began airing a week later.Along with the weekly San Francisco Examiner gig, Judd began doing illustrations for The Complete Idiot's Guide series through QUE Books. Since then, Judd has illustrated over 300 Idiot's Guides and still does the cartoons for the computer oriented Idiot's Guides line.A collection of the computer related
