Independent booksellers across the country have chosen The Skeleton and the Cat (HarperCollins) by Brandon James Scott as their top pick for the July/August 2026 Kids’ Indie Next List. 
“An absolute delight! The funny banter between Skeleton and Cat is equally matched by the adorable illustrations. This is a wonderful tale of friendship but just a so-so manual for sandwich eating. Loved it,” said Nancy Baenen of Arcadia Books in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
Here, Scott discusses The Skeleton and the Cat with Bookselling This Week.
Bookselling This Week: This is the first book that you've done where you've been the author as well as the illustrator, right?
Brandon James Scott: Yes. Years ago, I did write some books and illustrate them, but they were adaptations of an animated series. This is the first original story that I've written!
BTW: It's super exciting. Let's talk a little bit about the origin of the book. Would you tell me about the Dead Cat project and how this developed into a full story?
BJS: I've always been really big on personal projects.
I worked in animation for 20 years — I just left that job back in the new year — and I've been making books for 10 or so years.
Even though I've been busy with work-related art stuff, I've always wanted to do my own things on the side. That's how new things get started. You never know where something might go.
It had been maybe six months since I had done any personal work, and so I made this commitment to myself to do an illustration a day, just to get myself back into it.
For some reason, I settled on these two characters. I think because they had appeared in drawings in my sketchbooks from time to time over the years, but I never really did anything with them.
I just started making pictures with this Grim Reaper-y skeleton and this little black cat. It was like a daily picture project for me. I would spend an hour, make an illustration, post it on Instagram, do it again the next day, and just not overthink it.
I didn't have a plan. I didn't know it was going to become a book.
But over the course of making hundreds of these pictures over a few years, I ended up developing characters and an idea of the little universe that they live in. It was an organic process, something that gradually happened.
BTW: That's awesome. I do agree that it's super important to have your own personal projects going on.
I'd love to know more about the illustrations and the process. Did you revisit your original pieces? Are the illustrations in this title updated versions of earlier works for the Dead Cat project or did you build everything for The Skeleton and the Cat from scratch?
BJS: This is all from scratch, but I definitely stumbled upon some ideas through those illustrations from years ago when I sat down to make this book.
I owe my agent, Emily from Folio Jr., a big credit. We were looking for new work for me, because I'd been working as an illustrator only. We contacted some publishers, and some of the comments she got back were like, “Oh, we don’t have any work for Brandon right now, but is he ever going to do anything with that skeleton thing on his Instagram?”
Emily was like, “You should really turn this into a book.”
I had never thought of it as a book, so she was the one who pushed me to do so.
When I sat down to start writing it, I looked through all the illustrations I had and was like, “Okay, maybe there's a story that I can create out of these few things…”
The format of this book is a collection of five really short stories, because that felt really natural to me. When I was illustrating them, I didn't think of big stories, I thought, “What's a moment I can put them in?”
That was the mentality I had when I was making the daily pictures, and it was a similar mentality when I tried making it into a book.
It’s all new illustrations, and it's a bit of an origin story. I had never explained why these two characters were there or who they were.
Originally in the Dead Cat project, it was a Grim Reaper. Maybe the Grim Reaper has retired, or got fed up with dealing with death, and wanted to see what this life thing that all the humans seem to be concerned about is. That's why all the pictures were of them sitting in a garden, sitting in a field looking up at the clouds, or doing simple things in life.
It evolved a lot from that — now it’s just a skeleton — but that’s what was behind it all.
BTW: And the illustrations are absolutely stunning. They're gorgeous.
You actually answered one of my other questions, which was whether that format was organic. It’s unique, because it's a little bit longer than your average picture book, but it's also got those segments.
You've ended up with something that would appeal to a large age range — obviously including adults, because you’ve got so many booksellers already adoring it. I also think it would do well for mixed-age audiences, like at a storytime.
BJS: I hope so.
It's got some darkness, but it's not really a dark book. It's really bright and happy and so it's kind of cozy darkness or cozy horror. There's this weird dynamic of mixing the two together that hits a sweet spot, I hope.
BTW: It's going to work really well with kids who like darkness or horror.
BJS: Totally.
One of the reasons why I never thought that this would be a book is because there were pictures of the Grim Reaper, and I thought, from my experience in preschool animation, nobody's going to make a children's book about this.
I'm really happy that there's so many people in this industry that understand children, and want to give children what they want, and so they bought into this.
BTW: I can only assume that you have a cat.
BJS: Sadly, I don't. (I'm probably going to be getting one soon because my kids really want one.)
I grew up with cats, though, through my whole childhood. I know how to speak to them, and they usually come over to me first. I just get them.
BTW: I'm glad to hear you grew up with them.
There's this thing, when you read certain books or see certain art that has cats in it, where you're like, “Oh, this person knows cats.”
BJS: I'm really happy that in the second book, which I'm working on right now, there's even more cat stuff in it. It’s diving deeper into the way cats behave and their mannerisms.
BTW: We're going to get more?
BJS: Oh yeah! There will be a second one, with a similar format, and also three I Can Read books.
BTW: That's so exciting. We'll definitely look out for those!
BJS: HarperCollins is amazing. They really love this property.
The editors have cats and they were sending me their cat pictures as we've been working on it. They've been so supportive and amazing. So, we're going to make a bunch of these books, and hope that they get into the hands of lots of people, which is what the booksellers are all about — which is why I love booksellers.
BTW: That leads perfectly into my next topic. I know a lot of us got the chance to meet you briefly at Winter Institute…
BJS: That was my first time really experiencing that and meeting so many enthusiastic, interesting people. So many people that own bookstores and have cats at their bookstore were having me signing prints to their store cat.
It was great.
BTW: That makes us so happy to hear!
Do you want to tell us a little bit about the role of books or indie bookstores in your life?
BJS: I'm up in Canada and I used to live right in Toronto. There were some really great independent bookstores there that I used to go to all the time.
They’re are really cool places that have a unique environment. You walk in and it feels like a sanctuary — like, “It’s all about books in here.”
It is kind of like what music stores used to be. I remember going into record stores and thumbing through the things. The owner would walk by and be like, “Oh, that's a really good one. Have you heard them?” Then you get into talking about music…
That doesn't really happen anymore, but it still happens with books because we have independent bookstores.
The people running them are so in love with books, they’re so enthusiastic, and they’re looking for opportunities to share that love with people who come in.
Now that I'm all-in on making picture books, I'm really looking forward to this year and spending more time going into stores, talking with people as an author, hopefully doing events with them later in the year.
As an illustrator, a lot of the authors I worked with have been down in the US. Being in Canada, I haven’t had a chance to do a lot of events with them. I also always felt that as the illustrator, I was only half the story, so I never felt totally comfortable doing those events.
But now that I’m the author and illustrator, I’ll get to do them.
I'm really looking forward to meeting more booksellers this year through those events, because they're really great people.