Books

Mark Parisi of “Off The Mark” fame and novelist Kim Tomsic collaborated long distance on the diary-style book.

Kim Tomsic’s first attempt at collaboration was inauspicious, to say the least.

“I plagiarized my first book,” she recalled last week, speaking from her home in Arizona about her initial childhood stab at writing. “Copying my sister’s book about some cloud.”  

That was then. Now, the established author of middle-grade novels like “The 11:11 Wish” and “The 12th Candle,” and nonfiction books like “The Elephants Come Home,” is a seasoned collaborator — thanks to her recent partnership with Gloucester cartoonist and author Mark Parisi. That pairing resulted in the new she-said, he-said illustrated diary book “The Truth About 5th Grade,” published by HarperCollins.

Probably not surprisingly, Tomsic — who actually lived in Boston as an “Army brat” child — is the “she” and Parisi is the “he,” and the two traded off writing the diary entries of two pals, Charli and Alex. Those diaries (or in Alex’s case, his “journal”) document a riotous series of misunderstandings and misadventures about hopeless crushes, spying, dog poop, science projects, and any number of other complications.

It’s an idea that Tomsic says came from her editor at HarperCollins, David Linker. “And I was wondering, well, what’s the catch? What do you mean they want us to write a book together? And who’s this Mark Parisi fella?” she recalled. “And then of course I looked, and Mark is hilarious.”

And on more than one front: Parisi is the twisted mind behind “Off The Mark,” the off-kilter syndicated panel that began running in 1987 and basically took over where “The Far Side” left off, and is the author and illustrator of the “Marty Pants” novel series, also published by HarperCollins and edited by Linker. 

“It was December 2019 when I got this call. So to go into the pandemic working on this book together was such a gift,” Tomsic said. “Lovely distraction, anyway.” 

It wasn’t all smooth sailing though, Parisi said.

“The original concept was actually a little different,” he recalled. “The idea, which sounded great but it didn’t work in practice, was that the girl … would write an entire diary. And then the boy, Alex, would find the diary, and go in and write corrections on each page. So you would read her version and read what he corrected, but it was kind of unreadable.” 

“But the concept of the he said-she said was too good to let go, so we kind of put our heads together and came up with [writing] one page each, or one entry each, alternating throughout the book,” Parisi said. 

“It was challenging — a lot of false starts. It was a very vulnerable place” at first, Tomsic said. “And then that vulnerability just went out the window, because Mark just never dogged my ideas. He would just go with it. Or he would, you know, talk about me behind my back, which was great, because I didn’t know,” she laughed.

“It worked out well because I didn’t even read her stuff. I just wrote what I wanted,” Parisi joked.

In actuality, the book took form in a shared Google Doc that saw the pair working long distance on the developing story. “We did have a rough outline … We talked about how he would read her diary, and she would be aware of it, and she would start kind of playing with him that way,” Parisi said. “I think we had maybe the beginning and the conflict, and maybe the end figured out. But we didn’t really know what was going to go in between there — that would just kind of flow as we were writing.”

Fortunately for the duo, Parisi brought 37 years of coming up with daily punchlines under a deadline to the table. “I’ve been doing ‘Off The Mark’ since 1987. I used to get writer’s block just all the time, and it was so scary, and I’ve gotten to a point now where … I just skip the part about being upset. If I get writer’s block, I’m like, I’ll get over it. And I always do. So, luckily that stress part is not there anymore.” 

One aspect of the characters that they definitely wanted to get across is their true friendship — they’re not a romantic couple but genuine buddies. “There was never a point where that was even hinted at,” Parisi said of the possibility of getting them together, or even presenting them as each other’s “crushes.” “Even at the beginning of the book, Alex is saying, she’s not my crush. She’s my friend,” he points out. “You don’t see a lot of that [in middle-grade books], I don’t think, or enough of it.”

And then, of course, there were the illustrations, primarily handled by Parisi. “I don’t know how to do that,” Tomsic said, even though she admits she would have loved to have contributed cartoons to the book. ”Cartoonists are brilliant because you know how to make the synapses in the brain just fire. Instead of laying everything on the nose, you leave that space — instead of closing the circle, you make the C, so that we have to, like, get to the punchline.”

Instead, while Alex’s journal pages are heavily illustrated with Parisi’s cartoons, Charli’s pages are cluttered with doodles of hearts, stars, balloons and the like, all contributed by Tomsic.

“I thought the doodles were brilliant,” Parisi said. “It looks so authentic with just doodles all over every page. I thought that was a great direction to go in.”

“That was me never giving up wanting to draw something,” Tomsic laughed.

Hear the full conversation with Tomsic and Parisi on “Strip Search: The Comic Strip Podcast,” below:

Peter Chianca

General Assignment Editor

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Peter Chianca, Boston.com’s general assignment editor since 2019, is a longtime news editor, columnist, and music writer in the Greater Boston area.

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