Broken Frontier

Jim Ottaviani is the mastermind behind GT Labs. He’s been creating comics stories based on the lives of scientists for nearly a decade. His newest release Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder-Lizards will be released in the fall of 2005. Neil Figuracion sits at the GT Labs booth at Comic-Con and talks with Jim about his grand experiment.

Part 1 - The Grand Experiment

Broken Frontier: Can you believe it’s been a decade since Two-Fisted Science?

Jim Ottaviani: It’s not quite been a decade since the book came out, although it has been, I guess, a decade since I started thinking about doing this crazy science-comics thing. I’d been writing for comics periodicals like The Comics Journal, The Comics Buyers Guide since the early 90s, and about a decade ago I started thinking “maybe I could put together some comics myself!”

BF: What was it about these people and their stories, the scientists that made you think they’d be compelling to tell in a comic book?

JO: Science is actually very visual. The example I use when I’m talking about this is: If you read any scientific journal, from Scientific American all the way on through to the Journal of Really Difficult Differential Equations and Quantum Physics, [there are] pictures in every single one of them. Now, they may not be pictures in the way that the guys at Big Time Attic would draw, really marvelous, rich cartooning, but the diagrams, the models, and even the graphs are illustrations. Abstract ones, but still… So it’s actually a very natural fit. Scientists think and work visually, and comics, of course, is a very visual medium. So, I feel embarrassed that it took me that long to put the two things together in my own head, and come up with the idea of doing comics about scientists, but eventually I tipped to it and figured out that it might work.

BF: Were you interested in science when you were growing up?

JO: Oh yeah, very much so. I have a Masters degree in Nuclear Engineering. So that’s part of my secret origin. As a result, I knew a lot of stories that appeared in Two-Fisted Science, Fallout and Suspended in Language kind of by heart, even before I thought about doing comics.

BF: I find it interesting that there’s almost an underground sensibility to your books. Two-Fisted Science at least seems inspired by the EC series...

JO: Oh, no question. It’s a good catch.

BF: Two-Fisted Tales

JO: And Weird Science. In fact, if you look at the logo it’s a combination of the two. That’s the Two-Fisted Tales “two-fisted” and the Weird Science “science,” although I’ve messed with the ‘s’ in science, tweaking it and enlarging it so it made a better logo for my purposes. I did this with permission by the way.

BF: [laughter] Did you feel you were breaking new ground with your work?

JO: Oh no...no. I shouldn’t say that so strongly, but not so much. People like Joe Sacco have been doing true stories. There’s a guy named David Collier who does a book called Portraits from Life. Harvey Pekar writes about his own life. So it’s sort of a natural progression from the autobiographical, biographical tradition so many have contributed to in comics. But doing science? Yeah, I think I was the first guy to do that sort of thing, so maybe a little bit of ground got broken in that regard.

BF: How did you find the artists who work on your projects?

JO: I need an F.A.Q. because that’s one of them. The secret origin of Two-Fisted Science is in fact, me knowing a Steve Lieber, best known for his work on Whiteout — he has illustrated a number of books for DC. He was the regular artist on Detective for a couple years, I think it was. We lived about two blocks apart, for a number of years. We became friends through a mutual interest in comics of course. One evening over dinner, after I had loaned him a copy of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, we were talking about the book in general, and he said “Man, that scene between Bohr and Heisenberg in Copenhagen while the Nazis are occupying the country as a whole and Bohr’s institute in particular has tremendous dramatic potential. I said “Wow you’re right! It would be great as a book, a movie, a play, something,” and “what if I wrote this up as a comic strip? Would you illustrate it?” He said yes, really not thinking that I would ever do something because I’d never even tried. But two years later there I am in his living room, filling in blacks just before the deadline.

So Steve was encouraging, he taught me a lot about story-telling and with him on the project... He also taught me a number of things about getting people involved in this, because one artist, one twenty page story does not a graphic novel make. You need to have contracts, you need to know what you’re going to pay people, you need to have deadlines, and you have to have scripts. So, on Steve’s advice I did a lot more homework than I might have otherwise. I recruited Paul Chadwick as a cover illustrator next. I said “I’ll treat this as a commission, but I’ll tell you that I would like to publish it. I will try to pay you publication rate.” He was very kind, and probably cut me a break on that, because really and truly I can’t afford Paul Chadwick in the real world, just like I can’t afford Jeffrey Jones for the cover of Fallout in the real world. So it was important to a) have Steve Lieber and Paul Chadwick going in, b) having the professional stuff taken care of and ready when people ask...

Colleen Doran, who also worked on Two-Fisted Science, was skeptical when I approached her and said “show me the script and let me see the contract.” I had them both, and she knew I was serious at that point and said “Oh... okay.” I think someone like Colleen — marvelously talented and extremely busy — gets a lot of pitches, but she doesn’t always get a pitch with a complete script, with reference and with a contract from an independent publisher. The last factor in recruiting artists is offering them something that’s different. “I would like you to illustrate my action adventure about a guy in a cape” or “I’ve got this generic sort of Sci-Fi story.” This is a different sort of thing, and that’s the third factor that helps me attract the artists that I’ve been able to. It’s different. It’s not another drawing of Batman, or three pages of Daredevil or a Doc Savage pastiche.

BF: The Manhattan Project, talking orangutans... Where would you say is the best place to start with your books?

JO: I can’t answer the question intelligently, or at least quickly. So whenever people ask me “okay I’ve only got enough money for one. What should I do?” the question I’ll ask them is “what was the most recent fiction or non-fiction book that you’ve read? Comics or not comics.”

BF: If you like Jurassic Park...

JO: If you like Jurassic Park, [then] Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards. If the last [book] you read was short stories, then maybe the first book is the right, Two-Fisted Science, because that’s mostly short stories collected around a theme. You know, in that book and Dignifying Science it’s not all one thing, so if you get tired of a subject it’ll be over soon.

End Part 1