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During New York Comic Con 2025, beloved author Ann M. Martin sat down in The Studio with Popverse’s Ashley V. Robinson for an in-depth interview about her career. Martin is best known for creating the internationally bestselling Baby-Sitters Club prose series, which has recently begun to be adapted to a comics format by Scholastic Graphix. During the conversation in The Studio, Martin shared which one of the Baby-Sitters Club characters she’d be most comfortable hiring to watch her own children.

The information was revealed when Robinson asked, “If you were to hire one of the characters to babysit your own children, who would you most hope would show up at your doorstep?”

Martin answered, “Although I love all of them — I created Kristy first, I’m most like Mary Ann — but I would hope Claudia would show up. Because of the art materials.”

Robinson asked a follow-up question about Martin being most like Mary Ann. Martin explained, “When I first started creating characters for the series, the first two characters who I created were Kristy and Mary Ann. And Kristy was based on my best friend Beth from when I was growing up. And she was the one with all the great ideas, and she was the first female captain of the patrols at our elementary school and I was the shy one who just sort of went along with everything she said to do.

“That is very Mary Ann,” Robinson acknowledged. “But she’s also the one with all the quiet strength and dignity.”

Do you want to hear every bit of the conversation between Robinson and Martin in The Studio? Then check out the full video interview, available for you to watch right now:

Just like yourself, the Popverse staff spends a whole lot of time with our respective noses in respective books. It's why we've come up with stuff like:

• The hottest upcoming fiction
• Queer romance to add to your reading list
• A genre fiction literary column called If It Bleeds, We Read

...and a whole lot more. Join our metaphorical library, won't you? There are no late fees and you can be as loud as you want, so long as the people you live with are OK with it.