The YA-lit blogosophere plays host to the “Winter Blog Blast Tour” this week, showcasing interviews with a bunch of authors. Yesterday, Colleen Mondor kicked off the event with a Q&A with Laika creator Nick Abadzis:

After all the research you did, and confined by the specific length of this graphic novel, were you able to tell the story you wanted to tell? Is there something about Laika that you wish you had room to share?

It’s always easy to look back over a work and wish that you had done things a little differently. But a book is kind of like a song in that, once performed, it’s not your own any more. It takes on meanings to people who hear it, perhaps ones never intended by the original author. A book is the same, it’s not your own once it’s been read by others, and that’s as it should be. I can’t really lay claim to Laika’s story anyway, I just expanded upon the known facts and interwove my own story with real history. A lot of people have stated that they were unprepared for how the final pages of the book gripped them emotionally. But, in many ways this is how a lot of people around the globe responded to the news of her plight at the time, and Eisenhower himself stated in his memoirs his bemusement about the fact that the news of her fate almost overshadowed the technical achievement of the mission. Personally I find this a good thing; that our emotions aren’t so switched off by technological advancement that we can’t have an emotional reaction. We need to control our emotions, certainly, but if having an emotional reaction gets us thinking and debating too then that can only be a good thing in the long run.

Elsewhere, Bildungsroman talks with Tom Sniegoski (Owlboy), and The Ya Ya Yas chats with Perry Moore (Hero).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 9:29 am and is filed under Books, Creators, Graphic Novels, Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.