Moonstruck with Brian Floca

Jennifer M. Brown, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 4/7/2009

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More than a decade in the making, Brian Floca’s Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 (S & S, April 2009) is right on schedule for the 40th anniversary of the historic moon landing of July 20, 1969. Floca, in both words and pictures, recreates that experience for readers through lyrical language that emulates the majesty of the mission and images that capture the excitement of the day. On his Web site the author offers more details, and a brief video of his artistic process. Here Floca talks about his boyhood fascination with astronauts and space, and how he hopes to ignite that passion in a new generation.

The opening lines of Moonshot become a refrain in the narrative (“High above/there is the Moon,/cold and quiet…”). There is both poetry and science in this book.
There are two stories here: all the technical engineering stuff—and that is complex and interesting in its complexity—and then the simpler story of a beautiful trip to a barren place, so far away. I wanted the complicated material in there because I like the machinery and the gizmos—but it was the simpler story that I wanted to govern the text.

The illustrated time line on the opening endpapers is nifty. How did you decide what to include in it?
I realized I needed to keep the text as simple as possible, but I still wanted readers to understand everything that was going on. The details are there, but not all are in the body of the text.

Moonstruck (Floca)
© 2009 by author

How long did you work on the book?
Growing up, I had a fascination with astronauts and spaceships. Then probably 10 or 12 years ago, I read a book by Andrew Chaikin called A Man on the Moon (Penguin, 1995). It was fascinating, a great book and a great story. I was already doing vehicle books, and the idea of doing a book on this subject matter was a pull. I took a few stabs at [it]; I did additional reading and started writing. My problem then was that I fell absolutely in love with all the facts and technical information—ignition codes, and so on. I wrote a few drafts that would have been deadly for a young reader, or anyone who was not as transfixed with the topic as I was. The only thing to do with those drafts was to put them in the desk drawer. Finally, after some time away from the source material, I found that many of the details that I’d gotten so caught up in had slipped away from me, but the big themes had stayed. That was when I finally felt able to write it.

Were you working on the illustrations at the same time?
Once I had the [text], I looked as carefully as I could at the NASA photographs. The drawings were a space where I could pour in as many of those details as I could fit—all the minutia is in them.

The spread depicting the launch of Apollo 11 builds terrific tension in the way the images in the cartoon panels toggle between the spectators’ and the astronauts’ perspectives—and in the full-bleed spread of the liftoff. Can you talk about how you created this sequence?
It didn’t feel as much like creating it as finding the right way to channel or embody it. Is there anything more tension-filled than a countdown? This might be apocryphal, but the story goes that there was a refrain among the astronauts [leading up to liftoff], “Please don’t let me **** this up.” And that’s how I felt with this…. You’re looking for the best way to convey the suspense, the sense of risk, and the fact that millions of people are watching. If you go back and watch the original news footage, whether it’s Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley reporting, you can hear the tension in their voices, and you can sense it in everything you read about that day…. All that emotion was there–[as a writer] you just try to find a way to structure the story, set the stage, and then get out of the way.

Moonstruck (Floca) © 2009 by author

Were the predominantly dark spreads challenging? The darkness looks so rich.
Very early on, [my editor] Dick Jackson said, go as black as you can with the black. So I did. It’s just black acrylic, “Mars black.” What was tricky about [illustrating the flight] was that I put down the acrylic as the last step...I had to learn how to anticipate that overwhelmingly big change so close to the end of [the process].

Kids are going to love the illustration with the food and toothbrushes floating inside the spaceship.
I added humor where I could and where it felt right. Michael Collins looks like he’s about to get hit in the head by the beef hash; that was the one license I took—I have no evidence that Collins was ever threatened in that way by floating food. But I didn’t want humor to get the upper hand. That moment when you look back at the Earth, that’s the lead moment in the book, and everything else in the book had to support that.

And your artwork really does that, when readers literally “raise the curtain,” going from the spread of Neil Armstrong standing on the moon’s surface, looking up, to that next spread, his view of the Earth.
This was going to be a 40-page book, and Simon & Schuster generously agreed to expand it to 48 pages, specifically for that page turn and a couple of others. That’s what I love about the picture book, that built-in physical suspense of turning the page. There’s no other medium that gives you that experience.

Hear Brian Floca pronounce his name

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