Marcelo Verdad: Hello, my name is Marcelo Verdad and I'm the author and illustrator of The Worst Teddy Ever y El Peor Teddy del mundo.

The story is inspired by a relationship that I had with someone when I was younger, where I had some expectations on them and they had expectations about who I was supposed to be, and those were not met from both ends. So that didn't allow us to see each other for who we are really and to take each other for who we are and just embrace what we had in front of us. Well, my relationship with this person is great and we worked through these and we were able to see each other and to take each other and appreciate each other for who we are.

This book is a little bit about expectations and how sometimes those are not the best in relationships. But also, I always say that my work, I make it first for myself, that meaning for my inner child. I made this book for a younger version of Marcelo. Something very important that I try to tackle in my work is I like to just explore the concept of neutrality. This doesn't need to be like this tiny part of our media. This doesn't need to be part of the final answer. But I see in media just the concept of good versus bad and I don't think that it has to be that way. And I like to explore the gray areas of maybe how sometimes you can be good and then just have one "bad action." And that's fine, but that doesn't make you bad. And that's something that I was trying to talk about in my book. We have all these monsters that maybe you might perceive them as bad, but they're not necessarily bad.

I can say that the first spread where Noa and Teddy, they're drawing, actually those drawings are posts on my Instagram of my own work. So there's that. That's a tiny Easter egg. But I can tell you a little bit more about the endpapers, which are actually my favorite spreads from the whole book. Those were very, very fun to create because it was like just me being done with the whole book and then creating fun art for my own work, because I always say that I'm my own biggest fan. So it was very, very fun to just draw with no pressure and then just keep it fun, and then think kind of the possibilities of what could happen earlier in the story or what could have happened before The Worst Teddy Ever happened. And then also what happened before The Worst Teddy Ever.

So that was just me exploring those possibilities and I loved them. I just loved the simplicity of the more monochrome color palette, the simple shapes, and also just the freedom of, I was done with the book already, now, I get to just have fun and play with my characters and draw them again. And then the last spread, which is the last endpaper, I think that it's the only spread where all the main characters appear at the same time. So it's just fun to see all of them all at once. Something that I can say is that this a project of love that took me around five years in the making, and I'm very, very proud with what I created, and I'm very, very happy. So I hope that you enjoy The Worst Teddy Ever y El Peor Teddy del mundo as much as I did creating it.