1. Please tell us about your creative process, including your research.
I start with ideas, like everybody else, and then spend a lot of time doing research. If, through that research, I see that the idea has potential as a story — one I’ll want to spend years working on! — then I do even more reading. That’s when I try to get as close to primary source material as possible, so that means visiting archives, reading letters, doing interviews, and more whenever possible.
All this research and reading may sound like torture to some, but I enjoy it so much that I usually find it hard to stop and get down to the real work of writing the stories. I eventually tear myself away from reference material and sit down in front of the computer and write a lousy first draft in full script form. That means I describe every panel on every page in some detail. That doesn’t mean that in the end an artist has to draw it how I wrote it, but I don’t feel like I’ve done my job unless I can visualize the story myself, and have given them at least a starting point for the imagery to react to.
After setting it aside to cool for a while I revisit, rewrite, and do more research to fill in holes I've found in the story.
By this time the story is real enough for me to see it in a particular style (cartoony? realistic? somewhere in between?), so that's when the publisher and I start talking about artists, and then we approach people and see who’s available, interested, and has the right look for the book.
2. What draws you to comics as a medium for sharing stories?
This is a question I’m asked often, and I like it because I get to suggest an experiment. Close your eyes and imagine the best possible local bookstore or library. Walk inside, and browse the literature shelves. Flip through a bunch of books. You don’t have to imagine reading them; just visualize what you’d see if you took a quick glance at what’s inside. Then head over to the science section and do the same thing. Now…where did you see the pictures?
(If you actually played along, you performed what scientists call a Gedankenexperiment, by the way; it’s German for “thought experiment.”)
You already knew the answer, perhaps without realizing you did! That’s because scientists communicate with both words and images. They always have, always will. So what could be more natural than using comics to tell stories about science? It’s interesting to me that while I still occasionally hear about folks pushing back against the medium as a way to tell such stories, the scientists and engineers I talk to never do. They get it right away, and are adept at reading a script and seeing what the comic will look like in their mind’s eye.
3. Please share with us your origins as comics reader/maker.
I wasn't anything more than a casual comic book reader until relatively late in life. In my early teens I read a set of the tiny Pocket Books reprints of the early Spider-Man comics by Lee and Ditko to tatters, but that's about it. Before college, though, I read the newspaper strips religiously. I specifically remember following Gasoline Alley, Peanuts, Doonesbury, Dick Tracy, and Brenda Starr at home, and when I'd visit my cousins in Indiana I'd get to see many more, including Prince Valiant and Pogo (I think). Then my younger brother hooked me on some of the good stuff coming out in the late 70s/early 80s (Frank Miller's Daredevil comes to mind) and I branched out quickly to material from folks like Howard Chaykin, the Hernandez brothers, Alan Moore, Matt Wagner, and the list goes on. It was a great time to get interested in comics, and I would say that every year since has been a great year to get interested in comics.
In terms of creating them, throughout my college years studying to be a nuclear engineer I kept running across famous names in physics, and got interested in their stories — stories I would have been glad to read in comics. Those books never showed up in stores, though, and eventually I decided to make them myself. That’s in part because of Steve Lieber, a great comic-book artist and friend of mine. I had loaned him a copy of Richard Rhodes’s book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," and he pointed out that a wartime meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, which Rhodes described briefly, had great dramatic potential. When Steve and I talk about dramatic potential, we usually mean in comics. So I asked him if he’d draw the story if I wrote it up as a comics script. Knowing I’d never done anything like that at the time, he probably felt safe to say yes. A year or so later, I was sitting on the floor of his apartment, helping clean up the art (erasing stray pencil lines and filling in blacks) prior to taking my first book, "Two-Fisted Science," to the printer. (Interestingly enough, a year later Michael Frayn’s superb play, “Copenhagen,” came out, and it also revolves around the Bohr-Heisenberg wartime meeting.)
I’ve kept going and still love writing these books, so I’m glad nobody’s asked me to stop!
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