Boy sneaks home-made comic into library and becomes national sensation

An eight-year-old boy from Idaho has become a national sensation after he snuck his hand-drawn comic book into his local library.

Dillon Helbig, a second grader who created his “Crismis” (Christmas) comic at home last month, admitted to his parents at the end of December that he had left his work in the Ada Community Library in Boise, southwest Idao.

His parents phoned the library to ask for the comic book to be returned but as The New York Times reported on Monday, were informed that it had become a hit – with a waiting list of four years.

“It deserves a spot on our library shelves,” said library manager Alex Hartman of The Adventures of Dillon Helbig’s Crismis in an interview on Monday. “It’s a good story.”

“I wanted to put my book in the library center since I was five, and I always had a love for books and libraries,” Dillon told Good Morning America this week. “I’ve been going to libraries a lot since I was a baby.”

Mr Hartman told Dillon’s parents last month that librarians were so impressed with the 81-page work that it was entered into his library’s catalogue system, and had become a hit.

Readers are taken 400 years back in time to the first Thanksgiving after a Christmas tree’s star explodes and Dillon, the comic’s main character, comes across a “tree portal”.

Because books can be taken home for four weeks at a time, the waiting list for the “Crismis” comic book was four years long, Mr Hartman told reporters for The Idaho Press and KTVB in January.

Dillon’s classmates were then inspired to create books of their own, and the Ada Community Library is now running a workshop for children in Boise.

The Times reported that copies of the comic book will hopefully be created so that more library users can take the book home, and even publishers have approached Dillon and his family.

“It’s been quite the whirlwind,” his mother, Susan Helbig, said.