Jim Ottaviani, a local resident who writes graphic novels, especially about science, recently released "Feynman," a new book on the life of the famous and Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist Richard Feynman.

Due to his engaging personality and dedication to making physics accessible, Feynman became one of the country's most famous scientists. Written in graphic-novel form with illustrator Leland Myrick, the book tells the story of Feynman's life, including work on the Manhattan Project and development of important theories; explores his intellectual and other pursuits; and inevitably gets into some serious science. It's been favorably reviewed in Publishers Weekly and elsewhere.

Ottaviani also works as a reference librarian at the University of Michigan, and he just returned from a two-week publicity tour to promote the book. This Thursday, he'll give a talk at the Hatcher Graduate Library at 5:30 p.m.

The author agreed to answer some questions via email about the new book and related topics:

How did you happen upon Feynman as a subject for a book? Why did the subject matter and the graphic-novel format seem like a good fit?

I first learned about Feynman via his popular collection of stories called "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" which I first read while I was a grad student in nuclear engineering, here in Ann Arbor. I was hooked on him as a personality—though this was well before I even considered doing comics about scientists—from that moment on.

As for being a good fit for comics, Feynman was a Nobel prize-winning physicist who wrote best-selling books, cracked safes while working on the Manhattan Project, painted professionally, played percussion, and went out of his way to make sure his life and the lives of everyone around him was interesting. He worked with geniuses like Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, and Oppenheimer, and his own genius and curiosity led him to influence and work directly on the atomic bomb, nanotechnology, supercomputing, and the space shuttle. His signature work was on quantum electrodynamics, and people still use the funny looking pictures (his description for what others call "Feynman diagrams") he invented to aid the complicated calculations the theory requires.

In short, he got his fingerprints all over the 20th century.

As for doing the story as a graphic novel, I always think the medium is a good fit for talking about science and scientists, and Feynman is particularly good because so much about his life had a visual component to it, from his looks to his interest in art to the aforementioned diagrams.

How did you connect with your artist, Leland Myrick?

I've known Leland for years, though we only ever saw each other or talked much when we happened to be at the same comics convention. I've admired his work since the first time I saw it, though, so when the publisher proposed him as an artist I was excited.

Was the concept difficult to pitch to a publisher?

Not at all! They were keen on the proposal right from the start, and have fully supported the book ever since. It's been a lot of fun working with them, and I've learned a great deal in the process.

How did you decide to use a first-person approach to Feynman's story?

We inadvertently took our cue from Feynman himself, I think. What I mean when I say it was inadvertent is that it wasn't a conscious decision—using the first-person happened naturally. But when you look at Feynman's own books about himself, that's of course the voice he uses, and in retrospect it's clearly that voice that stuck in my head when I wrote the book.

The bibliography makes it clear you did a tremendous amount of research. Was there ready access to the materials you needed? Was there anything you knew or thought existed that you wanted to see but couldn't for any reason?

There was indeed ready access to almost everything you could want, except for perhaps Feynman himself. (Though he probably would have said "I'm too busy to talk to you" if someone approached him about doing a biography while he was alive.) As for things that I knew or thought might exist, but couldn't get to, no, I can't think of anything.

How did you decide which episodes to include in the book? Did you feel like you had to leave a lot out?

That's just the right follow-up question, isn't it! We left a lot out, and the criterion for deciding when to do that was this: Does this scene tell us who Feynman was, and why readers should care? With that, the peripheral stuff revealed itself as not central to the story. And so it had to go. It tore a piece out of my heart each time, but that's life.

The good news is, that means there's a ton of stuff for readers to explore via the bibliography and reading list we included!

When reading Feynman's own words, what would make you decide to put something directly into the book? What qualities made you think, "this is going in verbatim"?

Feynman is almost always quotable, so as we talked about before first and always, if it served the overarching story it went in, and if it didn't, it didn't. Feynman knew that a collection of stories is not the same as a narrative, and as we just mentioned, we had to leave out a lot of great anecdotes just because they didn't fit. To more directly answer your question, not a lot went in 100 percent verbatim, so we used a quote if we could edit it down to a length that made sense for comics dialogue and still kept the feel and cadence and verve of Feynman's own words.

Ann Arbor gets a brief cameo in the book when Feynman drops off a colleague here while driving across the country. How did you learn about that?

If I recall correctly, the details of that road trip comes from one of Freeman Dyson's memories. And it turns out that notes taken at one of Feynman's lectures here are online and freely available via the HathiTrust to all. (And with that I've fulfilled my obligation to give a nod to U-M's Library, where I work by day!)

I assume you must have been pretty familiar with Feynman going into this. What's the most surprising thing you learned about him while working on the book?

The most surprising thing was how revealing some of the letters he donated to the Caltech archives were, and that he saved them in the first place. He never struck me as a nostalgic person, or one who lived in the past. Not all are flattering to him either, so I wonder if he kept them to remind himself, and now us, that he was a real person, with all the contradictions and failings that go along with that.

Feynman's wisdom clearly comes through in the book. If you can, what would you choose as the single most important lesson he taught?

The best way to learn something new and to have fun is, when offered adventure, to say yes. It may not work out (in which case you can say no the next time someone offers you that particular flavor of adventure!), but say yes more.

Do you have any other projects in the works?

I have two big things coming up, and I'm not sure in what order they'll appear. But the one that's closest to being complete is a book about Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas...with a little Louis Leakey thrown in for good measure. It's about the lives and the primate research these three pioneering women—and they were pioneers in more ways than one -- did, and I'm thrilled with the work Maris Wicks is doing on the book, and her work is charming and clear and beautiful.

The other story is almost as different from the primates book as it can be. It's about Alan Turing, the mathematician responsible for modern computer science. He was also instrumental in breaking the formidable Enigma code used by the Nazis in World War II. The arc of his life is tragic, though, and the spine of the story is about a secret he perhaps shouldn't have kept, but did, and the repercussions of his being honest about something that the society he lived in would rather he'd kept secret. His is an amazing story, but like I said, a tragedy. Leland Purvis, who drew "Suspended in Language", is doing the art for it.

Jim Ottaviani will speak at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 13, at the Hatcher Library Gallery, 913 S. University Ave. A book sale and signing will follow, courtesy of Vault of Midnight. "Feynman" is available at most bookstores, both physical and online.

Bob Needham is director of entertainment content for AnnArbor.com. Reach him at bobneedham@annarbor.com or 734-623-2541, and follow him on Twitter @bobneedham.