across Knight as something of a bit player in their lives. As I got further into the Cope and Marsh story, and I liked the two less and less as people—which is different from liking them as characters, of course—I wanted to have a character in the book for the readers to root for, and neither of the scientists could fill that role. When I found out that Knight had met Cope just before Cope died, I became convinced that he was the character I needed. Ottaviani's interest in Knight eventually led to his company G.T. Labs publishing Knight's autobiography, with notes by Ottaviani and forewords by Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen. Other character relationships were fictionalized as well: editor James Gordon Bennet, Jr. never lobbied with Cope, and never exposed Marsh's will. Cope's bones also never made it to New York. Some conversations, due to their private nature, were fictionalized; Ottaviani makes up Marsh's lobby to Congress and what happened during his meeting with President Grant, and P.T. Barnum never told off Marsh the way he did in the novel. Ottaviani wove the story Marsh tells about the Mastodon from several different versions of the legend. A key plot point is fabricated for the purposes of dramatic irony: in the book, Marsh has his agent Sam Smith leave a Camarasaurus skull for Cope to find and mistakenly put on the wrong dinosaur. Instead, Hatcher finds it; Smith tries to keep an unwitting Marsh from getting it, but due to Marsh's obnoxious manner he lets him after all. As a result, Marsh mistakenly classifies the (non-existent) Brontosaurus. Ottaviani wholly invented this scene, as "The literary tradition of hoisting someone up by his own petard was too good to pass up." While Ottaviani was putting his ideas together, he met Zander Cannon at the 2004 San Diego Comic Convention. Cannon and associates were forming a new production studio, "Big Time Attic"; Ottaviani mentioned he had a proposal he wanted to show them. Ottaviani considered such a new studio taking on as large a project as a 160-page graphic novel was "ambitious" and that he was lucky to have had the book published. Even the format—the book is wider than it is tall—was a departure for Ottaviani. He explained that since the story was talking about "wide expanses of territory" and the American West, the artists at Big Time Attic wanted a