I’ve had a few things Midnight Sun-related trickle in over the last week or so, so here’s a rundown:

Brian Heater over at the Daily Cross Hatch ran a nice write-up of the book back on the 23rd. The blog itself, including the review post in question, seems to be having some technical issues and is stuck in a state of perpetual reloading, so here’s Google’s cache of the review.

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Since I’ve been blogging about Midnight Sun and its subject matter I’ve been exchanging the occasional email with Ingunn Løyning of the Spitsbergen Airship Museum. The museum up until this point has been mainly in the organizational stage–planning, accumulating a collection, etc.–but is set to open in Svalbard, Norway this year. At any rate, Ingunn recently sent me a link to this documentary (alas, in Italian) about the Italia‘s captain, Umberto Nobile. The navigation is a bit peculiar: you click on one of those thumbnails in the upper left to launch various segments of the film, which then plays to the right. The material specific to the Italia expedition begins about halfway through. There’s some really amazing footage included of the airship itself as well as the various crewmen.

The folks from the museum have also apparently forwarded a copy of Midnight Sun to a number of Nobile’s relatives, including his daughter, Maria. It’s pretty scary to think that relatives of the real-life individuals portrayed in the book are now reading it. It’s made me revisit my early thoughts when putting together the book regarding whether to use people’s actual names in the story.

Given the extent of derivation the story wound up making from the real-life events of the crash, I had given some real consideration to not using any real names for the people or the airship. Ultimately, I decided to stick with the real names, even if I wound up changing things around a bit in the story. I think if the story had developed in a way that any of the characters were portrayed unfavorably, I might have gone that route, but as things stood, I thought it might seem somewhat disingenuous and even disrespectful to not use the real names–almost as if I would be “stealing” the story and claiming it as mine. Anyway, it’s not like there’ve been dozens and dozens of airship crashes at the North Pole; it would have been pretty obvious what real event the story was based upon.

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When my father came to visit recently to see Marion, he asked me if he could have an original page from Midnight Sun. Of course, I let him have his pick of what I had on-hand. He managed, typically, to pick one of my absolute favorite pages from the book: the “circling plane” page from Chapter 5. He sent me a picture of it framed, which is interesting since I don’t think I’ve ever seen any page I’ve done framed (although I’ve sold and given away a few, some of which may be framed somewhere for all that I know).

A curious coincidence here is that my dad apparently just happened to have a model biplane in his house that appears to be the exact model as the one depicted on the page: a Fokker CV-D.

Thanks to Mike over at the Satisfactory Comics blog, who’s posted a nice review of Midnight Sun, along with some scans of artwork therein. As Mike notes, I’ve been involved in a few random projects over the years with him and his frequent comics collaborator Isaac Cates and he’s linked to a few of those in the post itself.

Among the many kind words about the book, Mike gives a shout-out to my supposed boot-drawing skills… and while I’d love to be able to claim this rightful honor, I’ve got to come clean and confess to the use of actual boots as reference for a lot of the drawings in Midnight Sun, and certainly in the panel he’s highlighted:

Thankfully, the design of basic leather lace-up boots hasn’t really changed that much over the years, so I was conveniently able to use these beat-up army surplus books from my rock and roll past as reference throughout. No boot-drawing prodigy be I, I’m afraid… but there’ s no shame in using reference, folks. I’ve seen many a student sit at a desk for hours, struggling to draw, for example, a decent-looking car, while an entire street-full of cars sits just a few feet outside the building. Foolishness, I say!

Now, if only I’d had an army surplus airship handy… For a very, very early draft of the book that involved a whole lot more drawings of the Italia itself, I got so frustrated by my inability to get decent drawings of the oddly-shaped craft that I built a little model of the thing by doctoring up a model of the Hindenburg with a hacksaw, Dremel tool and a bit of Bondo:

While you’re over at the Satisfactory Comics blog, you should really check out Mike and Issac’s collaborative story they’ve just wrapped up for the upcoming volume two of Elfworld.  If there’s ever been a more challenging collaborative story done in comics, I sure as heck don’t know what it is.  I’ve been intending to do a full post on the completed project, but for the time being, just go have a look.  I think the best way to view it from the beginning is to start here, reading bottom-most post to top-most, then moving forward in time by clicking “Newer Posts” on the bottom left of each page.