The LA Times has profiled Big Nate creator Lincoln Peirce about his success with his strip and his friendship with Diary of a Wimpy Kid creator Jeff Kinney.
“Big Nate is almost two separate entities,” said Peirce, 49, who started the comic strip in 1991 to amuse himself. The strip, about a spirited sixth-grader who lands himself in trouble for situations he never saw coming, is now syndicated in 300 newspapers. It was never intended for children.
But that changed three years ago, when the artist from Portland, Maine, reached out to Kinney. Kinney had been in contact with Peirce almost two decades earlier, when their roles were reversed. Kinney, at the time, was a college student and comic strip aspirant who had been reading Big Nate in the Washington Post. He wrote to a handful of syndicated cartoonists seeking advice, Peirce wrote back, and the two maintained a correspondence for a couple of years before falling out of touch.