Broken Frontier

Genre Bender is an irregular primer to the world of comics without superheroes.

Jim Ottaviani is the mastermind behind  GT Labs. Neil Figuracion sits at the GT Labs booth and talks with Jim and Kevin Cannon of  Big Time Attic about their work on the upcoming graphic novel Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards.

Part 2 - Dinosaurs and Attics

BF: How much do you, Jim, have to read about a person before you can handle their character in a fictional context?

JO: Oh, that’s a really good question. I’ve never thought of it in terms of quantity. I usually think in terms of time I spend researching, and just living with the ideas of people. For Bone Sharps, for instance, I first got the idea through noticing the title of a book that had just come out called The Gilded Dinosaur. It had a really long subtitle that talked about paleontology, fossil hunters, and things like that. Then [I] said “That sounds great!” and began reading books about these folks. It was about two years of reading and jotting down notes before I was really ready to write a script. That doesn’t mean I hadn’t written anything in that time, since I started writing scenes before I had a complete handle on the characters.

One of the nice things about doing comics, and doing them collaboratively is I don’t necessarily have to have a perfect handle on the characters, because the artist will bring things into the story that maybe I didn’t see. Just because they’re so concerned with staging, positioning and body language. I’ll specify some of that in the script, but never to the detail that actually has to be put onto the page. So the characters develop, to some degree in the script. For the most recent book I wrote character sheets for myself and imagined “what religion was Marsh?” and “what was X about Cope?”

Doing this takes me about a year and a half, two years to actually get into it, and know what the character is. I tried something new with Bone Sharps, and tried to write out... Okay, the guy’s a Lutheran, and tried to build the character up and know more about them than I had with any of the others. If there was a weakness in the previous books, especially the first two of my books, it’s in characterization. I don’t think the people feel as alive in them as they might. I think Bohr comes alive much more, and it’s easier because I did 270-80 pages on Bohr himself [in Suspended in Language], and didn’t try to shoehorn a lot of other people in.

BF: Tell me about your fans.

JO: I see people from all walks of life. It pretty much splits fifty-fifty male/female. It ranges from school teachers to faculty members at colleges, through to relatively young kids. I don’t get a lot of fan letters or anything like that, but people I meet at conventions are readers first and foremost and for me that’s really the ideal.

The ideal fan is someone who says “I read your book. I read all the rest of the books, and then I went back and read some of the footnotes; read another couple books about Feynman.” That’s really cool.

BF: Feynman is a really compelling character!

JO: Feynman is a tremendous character. When I first pitched the idea to Ralph Leighton, who was Feynman’s friend and storytelling companion... you know, the As Told To guy in the Feynman books... relatively speaking he got back to me instantaneously, and said “Oh my goodness! I can’t believe no one’s ever proposed a comic strip” - He called it a strip, I’m not sure he quite got the concept at the time. “I can’t believe no one’s ever proposed doing a comic strip about Feynman! Go at it!”

So I did, and I had help from Ralph, and help from Michelle Feynman, [Richard]’s daughter. And those are pretty much everyone’s favorite stories from the first book.

BF: The Safecracker story?

JO: Yeah. Bernie Mireault did such great work on the Safecracker story. That’s probably the thing that has the most legs of anything I’ve done so far. Something like fifteen, twenty thousand copies of that story in print right now, in various guises. And that’s not counting its incarnations on subscription websites over the years

BF: How were your sales in the beginning?

JO: Sales were Independent Comic level sales. I haven’t quit my day job, and I’m not likely to any time soon. But the sales are steady and increasing. It’s a shallow upward curve, but it’s an upward curve. So every year, I sell a few more books than I did the previous year. That’s the way the trend line should go.

BF: What can you tell us about your newest project: Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards?

JO: It’s about cowboys, scientists and dinosaurs, the most natural mix you can ever imagine in a non-fiction book. It’s a story about the Gilded Age, which is the late 19th century, and two scientists who, as we’re pushing out west as a country after the Civil War, start to battle over who can get the most fossil bones and name the most species, and basically become the most famoust-est of them all. They’re collectors in the worst sense of the word. They both want it all, and they both want it to the exclusion of everybody else, and they’re willing to do bad things, and hire bad people to do more bad things [to] get the most fossils, and that’s the story.

But it’s also the story of Charles R. Knight, who’s the premiere dinosaur artist of the 19th and 20th century. A Stephen J. Gould says he’s the single most influential person in the field of paleontology that he can imagine, scientist or anybody, and [Knight was] an artist. We put Charles R. Knight into the book just because those two scientists are sort of despicable characters.

You need somebody to like and it was about time to feature an artist as a good guy. So Knight is the good guy.

BF: When is that going to be released?

JO: Our latest line is early September. That’s what we think.

BF: How close is all Zander Cannon’s art [to being finished]?

JO: It’s Zander Cannon, Shad Petosky and Kevin Cannon. The artists are Big Time Attic. You have one of them [sitting next to you] if you want to hear about the artistic process.

BF: Well, congratulations on everything!

JO: Thank you so much!

[Jim gets back to his busy task of talking to fans who’ll stop by his booth at Comic Con. I interrupt Kevin Cannon, in the midst of his lunch.]

BF: I’ll hope you’ll tell me about the artistic process behind Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards.

Kevin Cannon: First, let me tell you about Big Time Attic, because we’re brand new. The three of us were all freelancers; myself, Shad Petosky, and Zander Cannon. We’ve known each other for a long time.

BF: So you’re no relation to Zander...

KC: It’s a strange story with me and Zander because we went to the same college, we both live in Minneapolis, yet there’s no family relation. Anyway, we started last August, and Jim’s project was the first project. As far as the process goes, we’re literally in an attic about five feet away from each other, passing pages back and forth. We really like that studio style instead of first penciling something and then Fed-Exing it to someone on the other side of the country. We’re all there. We’re all doing everything. At the end of the process we ftp the files to Jim, and everything’s set. Like, I did all the lettering. Shad did all of the correspondence with Jim, and all the technical side of everything. We don’t like to talk too much about division of duties, because we really want to emphasize that we’re all doing this together.

BF: It looks pretty amazing.

KC: Thanks! It’s the first time we’ve ever tried to collaborate on something, so the next comic book may look a little bit different.

BF: So how much of this is finished?

KC: Jim says “ninety-five percent of the book is a hundred percent finished”

BF: Okay [laughter]

KC: We’ve got all the interior art finished, finished two days ago. Jim put a big, awesome Fact vs. Fiction section in the back of the book, and we’re going to do some spot illustrations for that, and the cover needs to be tweaked a little bit and the we’re good to go!

BF: Did you get any reactions to the Free Comic Book Day preview? [Free Comic Book Day is an annual promotional event where companies make thousands of copies of certain comics available at no cost to customers at participating stores.]

KC: Yeah, actually it was pretty gratifying, because there were a lot of people, professionals and non-professionals who, the week after Free Comic Book Day, would list all the books they got and would write reviews, and the consistent thing I heard about Bone Sharps is that this is the one book that stuck out for everybody. It was very different, and for a lot of people made their Free Comic Book Day enjoyable.

BF: Very exciting book. Congratulations!

KC: Thanks. Actually we got a lot of response. We had a four page “How We Did It” section. Basically at the Attic, we put together our entire process. People got a kick out of that. At Big Time Attic, we really want to push the education of how to... We know a lot of artists who’re very secretive of their tricks. We wanna be the opposite of that.

BF: So you’re like Penn & Teller with Magic, except for maybe not so opinionated...

JO: Yeah, those are funny guys. We got a lot of reaction about that too.

BF: Very, very cool. Thanks!