Why Pinocchio and vampires?
Van Jensen: At the start, the artist, Dusty, had this basic idea of Pinocchio killing a vampire in this one-panel gag cartoon. At the time I thought it was clever and then forgot about it. Then he called me out of the blue and asked what I thought of doing a book out of this. At first I wasn’t sure how to make a whole book out of this. But then I went back to the original Carlo Collodi story. It’s just such a brilliant story, so subversive and funny, and there’s a lot of stuff that’s not in the Disney cartoon. There were a lot of elements left hanging that I could pick up and weave together in interesting ways. I thought, OK, there’s potential for a real story here and not just a joke. It’s something that’s totally ridiculous, but we make it so that it has some meatier elements infused into it. LJS: The book got a glowing review on USA Today’s Pop Candy blog. The review noted that this is not just another story capitalizing on the vampire bandwagon. Is it frustrating that the book migh
