8-Year-Old Sneaks Self-Made Comic Book Onto Library Shelf

Who needs a literary agent? Not this 8-year-old author from Boise, Idaho, who just self-published and promoted his comic book in a most unique way. Turns out Dillon Helbig snuck a copy of his DIY comic, The Adventures of Dillon Helbig's Crismis—by "Dillon His Self"—onto a shelf at Lake Hazel's Ada Community Library, and now locals are clamoring for it, reports ABC News. Dillon tells Good Morning America that he's been going to libraries since he was a baby and that he'd had the idea for the past three years to create a book and somehow get it onto the library's shelves.

And so, after completing the 81-page comic book—which detailed, among other things, an exploding star placed on a Christmas tree and time travel back to the first Thanksgiving, per the Washington Post—in mid-December, that's exactly what the second-grader did, sneaking it in to the library during a visit with his grandmother and surreptitiously sliding it onto a shelf in the children's picture-book section. "It was naughty-ish," he admits, adding to KTVB: "I always be sneaky, like how I get chocolate." When his mom, Susan, discovered what he'd done, she called the library to make sure no one threw the book away. Library branch manager Alex Hartman was tickled pink over what Dillon had done.

With the Helbigs' permission, Hartman catalogued the book as a graphic novel, slapped a bar code on it, and officially made it a library offering for the Boise community. There's now a waiting list for the book. Turns out Dillon's innovative idea on sneaking his book onto the library's shelves can partly be attributed to genetics. "My dad did this when he was a kid and kept doing it," Dillon told GMA—except in Alex Helbig's case, he made 100 copies of his album when he was younger and snuck them into local CD stores. Hartman is now in discussions with the Helbigs to possibly make Dillon's book into an e-book, while Dillon is hard at work on his next creation: a book about a closet that eats jackets. He also says a sequel to his now-famous comic book is in the works. Check out an interview with Dillon here. (More uplifting news stories.)