From the Publisher: “Betty is an emotional chihuahua with a vivid imagination. When faced with adversities both real and perceived she handles the situations as best she can, and learns some valuable lessons about dealing with her feelings.”
More info About the Author: Scott Bedillion is an elementary school teacher, a chronic doodler, and a former collegiate cartoonist with the PITT News. The Chihuahua Betty series is his first foray into children’s picture books.
What inspired the Betty books?
That would be my chihuahua Betty. I’ve always doodled a cartoon version of her for my kids, and the cartoon Betty has been a class mascot for my homerooms at Greenfield School for years. She had such expressive eyes. I always imagined that she was full of thought and emotion and understood what we were saying to her. She passed away a couple years ago and my daughter has been asking me to write stories about her, so here we are!
Is there an overarching message to the series?
I suppose if there’s a unifying theme it’s “Being Nice”. In Betty Is Ready she figures out that calming down and being patient is beneficial. In Betty Meets a Yeti, she realizes that sharing is the nice thing to do. In both cases, just taking the nice route gets her where she wants to be.
How did you go about designing these characters?
Betty’s character just evolved over years of doodling her. She actually looks pretty much how it started close to 20 years ago with the giant google eyes and big ears but has been refined over time. The human characters are pretty close to some characters I did in the early 90’s when I was the cartoonist for the PITT News during my days at PITT. Parker for instance is pretty much a mesh of one character’s face with another character’s hairdo from my “Tales From a Small Town” comic strip that ran for a couple of years.
I noticed that Betty’s dialogue is in thought bubbles while humans get speech bubbles…
Yes! That comes from my suspicion that Betty could always understand every word that her humans were saying. Her emotive eyebrows, eyes, and ears always gave me the feeling that she was understanding and reacting emotionally to everything that was going on. So her dialogue is all internal; she’s thinking it, and the humans are actually taking. Betty understands everything, even if the human characters don’t understand her.
Who’s the reader or audience you have in mind for this series?
They’re children’s picture books, so the 3-8 age range seems right. But the text is hopefully grown up enough that older kids will find it funny. And ideally the adults reading it to the kids will find it funny too! I try to capture Betty’s inner emotional crises with the illustrations, which is what my older kid seems to appreciate. It’s the illustrations of Betty being dramatic that crack him up.
Are there any more Betty stories on the horizon?
As long as anyone is interested, and my daughter keep pestering me for more, YES! And they’re just fun for me to do, as a compulsive doodler. I have several more stories mapped out, so there are more currently in the works. The next one, Betty Loves Teddy, should be ready later this Summer.
For more about Scott Bedillion and the Chihuahua Betty series, visit https://bettythechihuahua.wixsite.com/betty
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