As part of this year’s multi-blog Summer Blog Blast Tour, there’s an extensive interview with me posted over at Colleen Mondoor’s literature blog chasingray.com. This is the most extensive interview I’ve done about Midnight Sun, and probably the only really in-depth interview I’ll do specifically about the book since the it’s been out for a while at this point.Colleen is a scholar of northern exploration and, because of her background in both this and in general literature, she hit me with a number of pretty interesting questions that aren’t typical the usual line of inquiry one usually gets from interviewers from the comics press.
I’ve read some of the interviews you have done online and I think I have a decent understanding of how you found out about the Italia (via a personal curiosity/interest in dirigibles) and why you decided the book really only worked as historical fiction, not nonfiction. (And I completely understand what you were saying there.) I do wonder though why you didn’t completely fictionalize it – why not just make up a dirigible and give it a different reason for being up there and not even consider the facts of this particular disaster? (The Andree flight was in 1897 so balloons and dirigibles were not unknown in the polar regions for several decades.) Why did you decide to keep your downed craft the Italia? [ to the rest of the article… ]
I think last year’s lineup included Eddie Campbell and Gene Yang, but it looks like this year I may be the only cartoonist on the roster. There’s a pretty solid group of prose folks on the roster, though, so keep an eye out this week.
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