And if you happened to pick up a physics journal, you’re likely to have run across a few pictures named after Richard Feynman himself. Yes, some of the pictures will be graphs, and none will look as good as the drawings Leland Myrick did for our book, but if you want images, science has ’em. I guarantee you’ll see more pictures per feature in the science stuff. If you don’t believe me, drop by your local library - a college or university library would be best, but a public library will work almost as well - and compare the literary magazines to the scientific journals. You’d be right, but even though you can touch all the walls surrounding that area without stretching your arms (metaphorically, anyway), it’s a great place to live and work. If you drew a Venn diagram and labeled the three circles and labeled them ‘non-fiction,’ ‘graphic novels,’ and ‘scientists,’ you’d expect a small area of overlap. For starters, he wouldn’t (didn’t!) limit himself to one big idea, so I’ll follow his lead and talk about three. What would Feynman do? That’s the question I’ve asked myself almost daily since beginning to write a book about him, and I’m still answering it now that it’s about to come out.

If you’re a writer, might they have application to yours as well? It’s time to find out in this Big Idea.

In the process writing itself he found inspiration from his subject, and discovered that Feynman’s own maxims and ideas had direct application to his own work. For Jim Ottaviani, it wasn’t enough just to write a graphic novel about Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (with Leland Myrick illustrating).

Feynman ottaviani