This is a concept I created years ago for a children’s book series. Originally called THE WHIZ KIDS, I later changed it to
THE KNOW-IT-ALLS, which I just thought sounded more unique. The idea is that it features four 11 year old children who attend an elite grade school for smart kids. But their shared secret is that they’re not just smart for their ages, they’re super geniuses, smarter even than most adults, and that’s what makes these four best friends. And the book series would be about the four of them getting into various wacky adventures and using their smarts to get out of trouble whenever possible.

The above group image is by KEITH HOWELL And then much late I got some individual images from CELINA HERNANDEZ:

TIM WHATLEY, a name I totally stole from a semi-recurring character on SEINFELD. He is the defacto leader of the group, he’s a mechanical whiz, always building some crazy new invention. One story I had in mind for the books was that he would build a robot double of himself to take his place at school while he played hooky. Only his three friends, who were all at school that day, would realize that the robot wasn’t really Tim, and as the robot began to malfunction during the school day they would all have to go out of their way to cover for it so that no one would find out what Tim had done. I think I mentioned this in my descriptions to Keith of each character when I contacted him about drawing them as a group, and it was his idea to have Tim posing with a robot in the picture, which I thought was just awesome.

SUSIE BROOKS, she’s a mathematics genius.

JAMAL JOHNSON, he’s the budding scientist of the group.

COLIN HAYAKAWA, this name is from a real life person, my godbrother. This Colin is a master computer hacker (of course, when I came up with this idea back in the early 2000’s, computers weren’t as widespread in use among the general population as they are now, so the idea of an 11 year old owning was unusual by itself).

I’ll note that I have since used this same name for a character in my BRIANNA HATES EVERYBODY comic-strip.

Looking up these characters in my PC files to find the images, I also came across the unfinished manuscript for the first book, which I see that I haven’t worked on since February 2005. Man, time flies. I think the concept is still solid, though. I should revisit it soon.