OF THE BEST
weren’t very many stories with black kids in them. So when this opportunity came, I just decided there was going to be a black protagonist and he was going to have friends of colour, and someone was going to be in a wheelchair – it was going to be an inclusive story, so kids could go ‘Wow, I’m in this!”’.
But how did this famous 63-yearold comedian, who co-founded Comic Relief and is now also an accomplished actor – he’s spent much of the last two years filming Amazon’s Lord of the Rings TV series in New Zealand, and is currently filming the prequel to The Witcher – know what kids more than 50 years younger than him want to read?
“I didn’t know that kids would be able to relate to what I was writing, but I did think about what I liked when I was nine to 12 – Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, Billy the Cat, the Mighty Thor, The Avengers,” he says. His book even has a comic strip at the end, drawn by the renowned Marvel and DC comics artist Mark Buckingham, because, like many of the kids of his generation, Lenny also loved reading adventure comics.
Like many children’s books, the Boy with Wings subtly carries a handful of important life lessons that children would do well to absorb, including that bullying is wrong and the importance of kindness. But Henry certainly didn’t want to ram any moral codes down kids’ throats, stressing that escapism and adventure are the important things about his book.
“You have to try and grip the kid as quickly as possible with the story, and if there are any messages in there like ‘be kind to people’ and ‘don’t bully people’, they should be submerged – you don’t want to be doing that in the middle of an adventure story,” he stresses.
Henry has already started penning his second children’s book, after getting a “fantastic” early reaction to The Boy with Wings and its “adventuresomeness”. So will the hero in his next book be a black child too?
“That’s a good question, no-one’s ever asked me that before – they never asked Charles Dickens or Stephen King whether their heroes were black or white, did they?” he says, wryly. “I suppose black authors are compelled to continually explain themselves about who or what they choose to write about.
“The next story is about two mixedrace twins, but I think a person of colour will always be front and centre in my books, because that’s who I am, and when I was a kid I wanted to read about people like me.
“But the books are for everybody, not just for black kids – they’re for all kids.”