The second book is the Jack in the Beanstalk in the Old West, but we wanted a big turn of the century city, sort of like a big Chicago, but it had been ruined by giants, because it was a Jack in the Beanstalk story. So I thought, are there any pictures of turn of the century cities that have been destroyed? And sure enough the big earthquake of 1804 in San Francisco, and of course, the Chicago Fire, and so I bought two books on those, and I would pour over those images.
And there was an image that just caught my — I just fixated on it. It was a giant rolling sewage remover, like an outhouse system, because the people still wanted to live in the city, but the city was ruined, and the plumbing was gone. And I thought, good grief, they had to figure out their plumbing for years while they were rebuilding the city. That is so fascinating. And I just kept reading. And I’d be like, oh yeah, I got to draw fairies and goblins and dragons, and then… Those are fun enough, but I want to know more about this history stuff. So I started doing small mini-comics just about history. At that point I was experimenting with web comics and blogging. And I set a pace for myself to put a new piece of content up every week day.
But, I did a little story about Lewis and Clark, a history story with a little bit of comedy. The story had to do with the fact that Lewis and Clark, and the core of discovery were consuming mercury, they were eating it in pill form, mercury chloride, the powdered concentrate of mercury, which of course led to them having explosive bathroom moments in the bushes, which I thought was a very funny thing.
So I made a little cartoon about it, and my agent put that out into the ether, and I started getting calls on it. They said, do you want to do a graphic novel series about explorers? And I was like, “Oh, explorers would be neat.” Do you want to do a standalone about Lewis and Clark? And then it just slowly turned into, do you want to do some history stories? You have this name Nathan Hale. And I thought, yeah, like I don’t have a history background, I love historical fiction.
I love accuracy and reference and research, and all of these things. I liked funny stories too, though, I wonder … can I make history stories? But make them really funny and we’d kind of make fun of the history, and make fun of the people, but we make it all accurate, and amazingly enough the people at Abrams said, “That all sounds great. Let’s do it.”
The weird thing I assumed there would be kids, maybe one kid per school that was a little history nerd. It turns out the kids are crazy for nonfiction and history right now. I got very lucky to be out at the same as I Survived by Lauren Tarshis, and the great Who Was? series by Scholastic. Kids are just eating up this nonfiction and this history. I think the fact that it’s all real stuff and real stories kind of gives them a thrill, gives me a thrill when I write it, so it’s been a great time for both graphic novels and nonfiction. And to be right in the center of it all with nonfiction graphic novels makes me very excited.