The story of astronaut Neil Armstrong is one with which most Americans have at least a passing familiarity; the culminating moment of his career is one of the most famous events of the last fifty years, and his perfectly phrased “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” will be remembered forever.
In their new children’s picture book I Am Neil Armstrong, though, writer Brad Meltzer and artist Christopher Eliopoulos want to give readers a sense of other moments in Armstrong’s life: the ones that made him NASA’s choice to be the first man on the moon.
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“He’s totally Hal Jordan,” Meltzer told ComicBook.com. “The whole time, I’m like, ‘this is who the ring would choose.’ 2814’s coming and it’s this. You know who the ring would pick. Why didn’t they pick Buzz Aldrin or someone else? Why did they pick him? It was clear. But it was all the stuff to get there.”
Comic book fans might feel a sense of deja vu in that kind of talk: courage, cooperation, humility, and a little bit of predestination are key components in many superhero origins, but certainly the idea of a young pilot who impresses his way up through the ranks feels a little bi tlike comics’ most famous test pilot, the Green Lantern Hal Jordan.
“We all know that Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon, but when you look back to when he was a little kid, the thing he wanted to conquer was this giant tree,” Meltzer explained. “He wanted to climb this giant tree, and how do you get up it when you’re little? You’ve got to be brave and you’ve got to make a plan and you’ve got to execute the plan. And as he’s climbing, he grabs a dead branch and he plummets 15 feet and lands flat on his back and gets the wind knocked out of him. The important thing he does in that moment is that he gets back up again. From there he starts to work and he mows grass at a cemetery to save money to buy food, then he saves money to get flying lessons, then he becomes a test pilot, then he comes an astronaut. We all focus on that giant leap for all mankind, but the only reason you get that giant leap for mankind — and this is what I want my kids to know — is that he focused on the thousands and thousands of footsteps to get there.”
Meltzer and Eliopoulos have created more than a dozen picture book biographies together under the heading “Ordinary People Change the World.” Meltzer, best known to comic book fans for his run on Green Arrow and the controversial DC event miniseries Identity Crisis, sprinkles these books in between his best-selling thrillers, mystery novels, and nonfiction. Most recently, he penned The Escape Artist, which hit stores in January.
I Am Neil Armstrong will be available in stores (and digitally on e-reader platforms) on September 11. Meltzer and Eliopoulos’s next “Ordinary People Change the World” book, I Am Sonia Sotomayor, will be available in November.
