COMICS & DINOSAURS: TALKING TO JIM OTTAVIANI

[MattBrady]

by Daniel Robert Epstein

After 25 years of reading comic books I thought every genre had been hit upon. Even though comic books have tackled classic literature to horror to autobiography and of course superheroes, Jim Ottaviani found a niche that hadn’t been filled. Scientists!

Ottaviani’s previous books deal with things such as the science and politics of the first nuclear gadgets, fallout, and stories of famous women scientist in Dignifying Science. His latest is Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards which is about Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, two scientists who found and fought for the fossil treasures discovered in the American west in the late 1800s.

Newsarama: First off, can you explain what the book, Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards is all about?

Jim Ottaviani: Well, this is the first book that I’ve done I think that crosses the line between fact and fiction aggressively. GT Labs, the publishing company that I have, and my own work are inextricably bound. What we do is stories about scientists. But for this book, I veered much more into the world of historical fiction than I have with any of the other ones. I had run across this idea of doing a book about these battling paleontologists at the turn of the 19th century. I started doing some research on them and realized that some of the battle wasn’t quite as exciting as I thought it would be or wanted it to be. It wouldn’t make for a story that would carry readers all the way through and get the points across that I had to get across.

Secondly, I didn’t like either of the main characters as I was researching them. Cope and Marsh are not admirable guys in that they are collectors in the worst sense of the word. They wanted it all and they wanted it all now. They were willing to do bad things to each other and step on people and do unethical things to make sure that they got the most bones.

With those two things in mind, I was looking for another character to play off this. We introduced the Charles R. Knight character and when Steve Bissette and I were talking about the book after it was done, he made a perfect characterization of the Knight character. He is the reader’s familiar in the sense that the reader can identify much more heavily with Knight than with these two scientists. He provides the glue to the story and brings the reader all the way through the ride. But Knight doesn’t belong in the story in real life as early as he appears in the story I wrote. He really only appeared in Cope’s life a month or so before Cope died. I wanted to do was introduce him earlier into the tale and give the reader somebody to sympathize with. He’s also a character that can express some of the reader’s frustration with these two guys who are ostensibly the main characters.

With that chink in the armor of pure truth, I let the story go from there. In the back of the book I play fair with the reader and let them know what’s true and what’s false. Two-thirds of the stuff is fact. Only one-third of this stuff is made up and a lot of that one-third is incidental.

On any book you do about any biography, prose or comics, you’ve got to interpolate. The author’s going to inject some opinion into it. But I still try to get as close to the truth as possible.

NRAMA: How did you come across this story in the first place?

JO: I’m a librarian at the University of Michigan and prior to that I was an engineering librarian. I was buying books for engineers to put into the collection because I thought they would be useful. I ran across this book about the bone wars. It’s like, “Man. That sounds really cool. Cowboys. Dinosaur fossils. Old West. People having feuds over it. Sounds great.” I couldn’t buy it because it’s really totally out of scope for mechanical or nuclear engineers. But I tucked the idea away. I wrote down the citation like any good librarian would do and looked the thing up later and read it and said, “There is a story for GT Labs in here and I want to write it.”

NRAMA: The artwork for Bone Sharps is done by Big Time Attic. Who is that made up of?

JO: Zander Cannon is the big name of Big Time Attic. Then there’s Kevin Cannon, no relation to Zander, even though they kind of look a little bit alike. Also Shad Petosky. I put together a pitch package for the story of a couple script samples, a couple images and a defined outline. I had it with me at the San Diego Comicon in 2004. Zander had just gotten back from spending two and a half years living in Japan. He and his wife were teaching there. He was also drawing the Smax miniseries by Alan moore.

Zander and I are Comic Con friendly and he stopped by my table to chat. I said, “Hey. I got this project.” He said, “Hey. I got this studio that we’re setting up.” Long story short, by the end of the show, they were pretty sure they were going to do it and I was really crossing my fingers. They did and on we went. It was a ball to work with them.

NRAMA: Who penciled this exactly?

JO: That’s a really good question. I didn’t know the answer either until the book was done. I didn’t want to jinx it by asking. The Big Time Attic guys said that they were grateful that I didn’t ask. I had to take the leap of faith that this is a studio that Zander and Kevin and Shad had put together and the product of the studio would have the elements in Zander that I liked and maybe something else. Here’s how it pretty much broke down though. Zander would do layouts, thumbnails and breakdowns. Kevin and Zander would typically pencil a tighter thumbnail and I would try to read it with my script in mind. Sometimes I would take the dialogue out because the picture said it all. On the very rare occasion, I would say, “No. I really do want it the way I wrote it and here’s why.” So Kevin and Zander would do those pencils and then Kevin would letter and then all three would ink. They said that by the end they can’t tell who did what. It really was a very strong collaborative effort because there was a lot of feedback going both ways.

NRAMA: What do your colleagues think of the book?

JO: I got really strong, positive feedback on this.

NRAMA: So take me through the history of GT Labs, if you could…

JO: The history of GT Labs starts in 1996 although the first publication was in 1997. But it started through conversations with Steve Leiber, who I’d worked with a number of times on the books and who is a good friend. Steve hadn’t read a book called The Making of the Atomic Bomb so I loaned it to him and we were talking about it afterwards. He said, “Man. This has tremendous, dramatic potential there and it would make a great play, a great movie or a great comic.” I asked him that if I wrote it as a comic would he illustrate and he said yes. A year and a half later we’re sitting in his apartment. I’m on the floor filling in blacks because we need to get it to the printer that afternoon. But GT Labs was a company that I started because I wanted to self publish. The first book I put out, was Two Fisted Science in 1997, and it was supported by a grant from the Xeric Foundation. I’ve been putting out books since then.

NRAMA: Have your books been used in any kind of classroom capacity?

JO: Oh absolutely. Sometimes to my surprise. I was listening to NPR last spring, and all of a sudden I heard someone from the Maryland public schools using Dignifying Science as a tool for reading and science literacy among fifth and sixth graders. Sometimes I get direct contacts from faculty. I know Fallout is being used in a course at Stanford.

NRAMA: How well do your books sell?

JO: They sell pretty well. I’m certainly satisfied with the sales. I would of course like to sell J.K. Rowling’s numbers and then I would be able to devote even more time to this and maybe even not be a librarian even more. Although I’ve got to confess, I like being a librarian. It’s a really good job and I enjoy it. My books are very steady movers. I turn over copies constantly. The distributors, Diamond in particular, have been very good to me in the sense that they know that a book that comes out from GT Labs, is going to make them and me some cash for many years to come.

NRAMA: What comics did you read growing up?

JO: Oh, the usual stuff. I wasn’t really a big comic collector as a little kid. I really only started buying a lot of comics for myself once I got into college. But I started with the usual stuff, Spider-Mans and Batman. I also got into Love and Rockets, The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, American Flagg. My comic habit started a little late.

NRAMA: What’s your next book about?

JO: The next one is about magic. It’s going to be part of a series of two, perhaps even three books. Each one will probably be no more than 100 pages. The artist, Janine Johnston, is at work on it. It’s the history and technology behind one of the most famous stage magic illusions ever mounted. The famous levitation illusion.

NRAMA: Is there enough there to make it a totally factual book?

JO: Yeah, but it’s not going to be as thick as the last couple. But after 330 some pages of Niels Bohr, 160 some pages of dinosaurs, it’s a good time to do maybe a graphic novella instead of a graphic novel. But it is a complete story.

Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards is 168 pages and priced at $22.95. It can be found at Amazon and many online retailers, bookstores and comic shops.

Check out the official website for GT Labs
http://www.gt-labs.com/

[CitC]

I picked Fallout up at a used book store a couple of years ago on a whim, and am I glad I did. It is what I hand to people whos eyes glaze over at the first mention of comics. They often see a bit of why I love the medium after they read some of it.

GT Labs put out beautiful stuff, and Bone Sharps was the best looking book las FCBD.

And "Big Time Attic" is the coolest name sor a studio ever.

comicsintheclassroom.net/

[Excelsior!]

Wow.

Must. Buy.

I did a bit of work at the Natural History Museum in London, and I always wanted to be a palaeontologist as a kid (before the career in music took over). The Bone Wars really interested me from a historical point of view, as well as for the discoveries that came out of it, so this looks right up my alley.

[sequart]

Looks different the the good way.

[c_andrew_s]

Looks good, I will defintely look for it

[Jason Seaver]

I knew I wanted this as soon as I got the preview on Free Comic Book Day, and I wasn't disappointed. It's a fun, fascinating story, and the art fits it beautifully.

[WiseManShazam]

Looks great

[Michael C Lorah]

I have Bone Sharps on my to-read stack. I'll hopefully be getting to it by early next week! I'm really looking forward to it.

[Paul Sizer]

Jim is, hands down, one of the true originals in the indy field, and he's got top notch talent lining up to work with him. His books are, in some ways, the LAST thing that you would think comics should be about. But then, THAT'S what makes them so incredibly cool. He makes science COOL! That is no easy task.

Jim is also one of the most credible self publishers out there, and he busts his butt to make his artists and retailers feel taken care of. He's worked so hard to get the best artists in the field to work with him, and BONESHARPS is no exception.

For a good look at the width and breadth that the comic medium can achieve, check out any of the books from the GT LABS collection!

Congrats, Jim!

[caleb]

This graphic novel was on my best-of '05 list...I'd highly reccomend it to just about anyone.

[Jim]

Just about everything Jim does with these scientist comics is fantastic. I've bought every one of them. You're just about guaranteed to learn something new, and maybe even understand things you already thought you knew better.

Of course, this one was double-special, being a full-length story and since I was a dinosaur fiend as a kidlet, I still have a strong interest in the subject.

[Lofcutus]

I have to add my praise as well. This book was excellent! It was perhaps the single most enjoyable item of the year! It is a great blending of facts, fun and felonious acquisition of fossils.

Like others, I was sold on it with the Free Comic Book Day preview.

[RedRonin]

This sounds like a really interesting concept and after seeing all the prasie other people have given this I got to check it out.