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Aaron Blabey is talking me through his tattoos, with great enthusiasm. “This is my French Nick Cave, my red right hand,” he says, showing off the words “la Main rouge” inked across his not-so-red right hand.
He shows me his left, bearing the words “Rain Dogs”. “Tom Waits,” he says.
There’s something from the late New York graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the words “fix your hearts or die”, from the third and final season of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, which Blabey regards as the best. “It’s just fabulous,” he says. “It’s what he wanted to make all along. It’s belligerently uncommercial.”
That’s a description no one is likely to direct at Blabey, the 51-year-old former actor and advertising copywriter turned author whose books have spawned two Bad Guys movies from Dreamworks Animation and a Thelma the Unicorn animated feature for Netflix, with more undoubtedly to come.
The tattoos, the leather biker jacket, the long straggly grey hair and beard all suggest ageing rocker rather than children’s author, but with almost 60 million copies of his 48 books in print, Blabey really doesn’t need to live up to anyone’s expectations but his own.
Snake (voiced by Marc Maron), Wolf (Sam Rockwell), Tarantula (Awkwafina), Piranha (Anthony Ramos) and Shark (Craig Robinson) in The Bad Guys 2.Credit: DreamWorks Animation
The Bad Guys 2, which opens in cinemas this week, sees his five animal criminals continuing in their efforts to break good, and being foiled at every turn. Mr Wolf (Sam Rockwell), Mr Snake (Marc Maron), Mr Shark (Craig Robinson), Mr Piranha (Anthony Ramos) and Ms Tarantula (Awkwafina) are back on a new adventure that this time morphs from crime caper to sci-fi tech-bro conspiracy thriller in space, with enough frenetic action to keep the kids happy and plenty of pop-culture and political references and sly asides for the adults.
“It’s fun, it’s a chance to be in something that lives on, like a Shrek or what have you,” says Craig Robinson, best known for his stint as Doug Judy in Brooklyn 99 and a frequent contributor to the Seth Rogen-Evan Goldberg school of smutty comedy (This Is The End et al). Plus, he adds, “it’s nice to do something that the whole family can see”.
Playing an animated character, Sam Rockwell observes, “you can be either goofier or cooler, depending on what your persona is. It’s fun to have an alter ego, and I’m a cartoon nerd … I still watch Looney Tunes, Family Guy, The Simpsons, Rick and Morty.”
Sam Rockwell records his lines as Mr Wolf.Credit: DreamWorks Animation
His Wolf, he adds, is “kind of like a scapino character [the escape artist in commedia dell’arte]. It’s a little bit of a Daffy Duck vibe. Not as cool as Bugs [Bunny].”
The Bad Guys has been likened to Tarantino for kids. While that fits with Blabey’s aesthetic and influences, he insists it wasn’t entirely intentional.
“It was always a game for me of taking things that are just inconceivable that you could put into children’s content, but finding a way to do it,” he says. His favourite example is a character in the second half of the series (he’s yet to make it to screen) inspired by Tobe Hooper’s 1974 splatter film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – a seminal work in the history of horror movies, children’s literature not so much.
“I invented a character who has chainsaw hands, and kids lose their damn minds when that guy turns up, they think he’s the coolest thing they’ve ever seen,” he says. “It’s pushing the line as far as I could so that kids felt amazed that they had access to it.”
It’s all about edging up to the line of utterly inappropriate, and staying just on the right side of it, he says. “And at the same time, making it funny. If it were serious and heavy it would be scary, but because it’s absurd it works.”
Have you ever been taken to task for being a bad influence?
“I don’t think so,” he says, before sharing a story about an encounter with Christian media in the United States that went far better than he could ever have imagined.
Aaron Blabey says he was a “terrible actor”, and until he was 40 he “couldn’t give my books away”. Credit: Wayne Taylor
“I think it’s because it’s all underpinned by a redemption arc. It’s characters who are trying to be better. As long as that remains the true north, I get away with murder.”
Blabey tells me he has fairly recently been diagnosed as being on the spectrum, news that came as a surprise to absolutely nobody but him. “I’m as autistic as they come, it turns out.”
He tells me this because he thinks it explains his approach to storytelling. “It’s taking disparate things that have no place going together, finding a way to click them together, and then seeing if it can be hot-wired tonally into something that makes kids go, ‘I can’t believe this is in the library’.”
There are 16 Bad Guys books in the library, each of them written and illustrated entirely by Blabey, and he swears the series is done now.
For a decade, he turned out two books a year. “It nearly killed me. I was routinely doing 90 to 100 hours a week. It was so much art.
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“I used to console myself by saying, ‘but look at those [Japanese] manga artists, they do these long-running series, there’s thousands of books. They must work harder than you do, so pull yourself together’. I didn’t realise they have whole teams! I felt really silly.”
He wanted each book to be better than the last – “I think the last four are the best in the series,” he says – but the effort nearly killed him.
“I was really burnt out by the end. I just downed tools, I thought, ‘I’m done’.”
Instead of writing and illustrating, he poured his creative energies into music. He’s been playing a lap steel guitar that used to belong to David Lynch – “it was given to him by [musician-producer Moby], it’s from 1932, I think” – and recording music that he wants to let seep out into the universe anonymously.
“I’ve found [music] more creatively inspiring than anything I’ve done, but I have no desire for people to know that it’s me,” he says.
He’s done a lot over the years, has Aaron Blabey. He became an actor aged 17 because he loved movies so much he felt like he “wanted to eat them”. It was, he insists, a “terrible choice. I was an absolutely shit actor. I know good acting because I love movies so much, and I would watch anything I would do and go, ‘that’s awful’.” (He did, nonetheless, play the lead in the ABC’s 1994 series The Damnation of Harvey McHugh, even winning an AFI award for best actor in a television drama.)
By his 30s, he had started writing kids books, without much success on the sales front (though again, there were awards). He spent a couple of years working for Saatchi, one of the biggest advertising agencies on the planet.
“I was a rubbish copywriter,” he says. You may detect a pattern here.
Aged 40 and in an almost mythical (and oft-shared) moment, Blabey’s life was utterly transformed.
For a decade he’d been writing books that typically had a print run of maybe 5000 copies. “I couldn’t give them away,” he says. But one day, while taking a walk through the streets near his home, something in his brain simply clicked into gear.
“In that one day, I invented The Bad Guys, Pig The Pug and Thelma The Unicorn. They all just came out at once,” he says. “That walk, I think, was the perfect collision between neurodivergence and desperation.”
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The desperation is long gone now. So, too, is the sense of needing to keep up the frenetic pace. But a mind like his just won’t be tamed, and after two years off “the tools”, Blabey is back.
He has a new series, The Game of Pets, in the works. When the pitch went out to market, he says, “this sort of feeding frenzy started”. He can’t confirm if it’s true, but his US agent claims he put together “the biggest deal in children’s publishing history”.
“This time they’re novels, so I’m predominantly writing, with a few illustrations,” Blabey says. “It’s middle-grade stuff. More like Roald Dahl, I suppose. It’s been the most fun I’ve ever had writing something for kids, it’s just delightful to do. And most importantly, it’s one book a year.”
And is there a film deal too?
“Things are in the works,” he says.
Of course they are.
The Bad Guys 2 is in cinemas from September 18.
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