This children's book was a family project for Chatham father and son

EDITOR'S NOTE: A misspelled name was corrected on Feb. 22, 2023, and a comment about payment was added.

CHATHAM — It all started with a skunk short on cash. But more about that later.

After five years of hard work and delays, Liam Campbell and his father, Tom, had their children’s book, "99 Cents Short," published.

“It almost finished me at first because it was so difficult, but I didn’t give up,” said Liam, who did all the illustrations in the 32-page book.

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Liam, 27, has been drawing ever since he was able to put a pencil to paper.

“As long as I can remember, if he wasn’t eating or sleeping, he was drawing,” said his father.

Liam's talent was evident even before 3 years old when he and his father lived in New York.

How art helped Liam communicate with the world

“I realized he could draw when he was little. We’d get on the ferry and there was a sign, 'Welcome to New York State.' He saw that sign and drew it, and that’s when I saw he could draw,” Tom said.

It was Liam’s first effort to communicate. He had been diagnosed on the autism spectrum.

“He was not verbal until he was 8,” Tom said. “Drawing was his first way of communicating.”

Just before Liam turned 3, the family moved to Massachusetts because services for special needs children, particularly early intervention services for those with autism, were better.

Tom is an assistant football coach at Barnstable High School. For years he coached at Dennis-Yarmouth.

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Liam attended Yarmouth schools during his elementary and middle school years and then went to Cape Cod Regional Technical High School in Harwich.

At Cape Tech, he was very good in all the arts and did well in computer graphics, but, as is the case with many children with disabilities, he had difficulties in the core curriculum classes, Tom said.

But he persevered.

After completing four years at Cape Tech, he and his father realized that he needed to pass the MCAS exams to earn a diploma.

“He said, 'I want to get out of high school, get a job and go to college,'” Tom said.

“So I stayed an extra year until I passed the MCAS,” Liam said. “It was hard, but I didn’t give up.”

The story of a skunk, a fish, a duck, a horse, a frog and a deer

After graduation from Cape Tech in the summer of 2015, Liam, for the first time, did not have a summer program to attend.

“He had nothing to do for the whole summer, so I got this idea for a book he could illustrate,” Tom said. “I knew he was a very talented illustrator. I told him to draw a picture of a skunk looking at a tree and in the background a train and a pond. I thought it would be really hard for him to do, but 15 minutes later he had finished the picture. It is the first page of the book.”

The story came from an old joke Liam’s grandfather used to tell about several animals — a fish, a duck, a horse, a frog, a deer, and, of course, a skunk.

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The joke is much shorter than the story and is actually a riddle in which the teller says the animals want to go to a carnival, but it costs $1, and then asks, “Which animal does not have the money to get in?”

Without spoiling the story, the fish has a fin, the deer has a buck, the duck has a bill and so forth, but the skunk only has a scent, thus the title "99 Cents Short."

“That (the title) was me,” said Tom, with a laugh.

For the next three years, Liam worked on 32 pages of illustrations, which are complex with multiple characters and full backgrounds.

He started with simple pencil and paper drawings, which is his preferred medium

Then he scanned the drawings into a computer program where he filled in the colors giving them a  professional animation style.

Yet, all the characters were developed from Liam’s imagination.

“It’s just my own style. I didn’t want to copy any other artist’s style,” he said.

Finding a publisher

With help from Tom’s friend, Victoria Martin, a special education teacher in the Barnstable schools, Tom and Liam were able to find a publisher, Jasmine Cabanaw of Green Bamboo Publishing, who was very interested after seeing Liam’s illustrations.

The project almost fell through when COVID-19 disrupted everything.

But Liam and Tom persevered.

There were a number of issues with getting the right software to prepare the manuscript in the right format, and Tom and Liam made numerous trips to Staples trying to get the right software.

“It was like a Larry David episode, that’s 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,'” Liam said.

Finally, it all came together and in April 2021, "99 Cents Short" was published and Liam held a book signing at the Yellow Umbrella Books in Chatham, where Liam and Tom now live.

He signed the books, “Liam and Dad.”

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The book can be purchased at any book store and is also available to order online through Amazon.

Though Liam did not make any money from the project, he said it was a great experience and a good start toward his goal to become a professional animator. Tom and Liam were paid by the publisher, but their expenses were greater than the payment, Tom Campbell said.

At the same time, Liam enrolled for two years at Cape Cod Community College in Project Forward, a life skills and vocationally oriented program designed mostly for students with special needs.

“After I graduated from Project Forward I became a real college student,” Liam said.

For the last three years he has been working toward an associate degree in visual arts.

However, his big project is a huge mural consisting of hundreds of Walt Disney characters to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Disney.

The mural includes the very first characters Disney created and contains almost all, if not all, Disney characters right to the present.

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Liam has several other ideas for movies or cartoons he wants to begin when he finishes the Disney mural.

One is an office story, but the characters are animals; another is a high school comedy story.

Dreaming of a future with Disney

Most intriguing is a story about aliens who visit earth to fix the environmental crisis.

Tom said Liam is very concerned about the environment and sometimes after watching a news story about it will lose sleep at night.

“The aliens are trying to fix the environment because nobody on Earth wants to do it,” Liam said.

After he finishes college, Liam said his dream is to work for Disney or Warner Brothers as an artist for animation and his goal is to bring back two-dimensional drawings.

“I want to recreate the wonders of 2-D animation. Although it is making a comeback, it needs a little more popularity,” said Liam. “That’s why I want to be a part of it.”

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Chatham father and son, Tom and Liam Campbell publish '99 Cents Short'