Discussing DRAGON with Spencer Ackerman

sitting down to talk about monsters and imperial power with the acclaimed journalist

Today I'm very excited to share -exclusively with Copper Bottle's paid subscribers- a deeply nerdy interview I did recently with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Spencer Ackerman, a 'crossover' between Copper Bottle and Spencer's Forever Wars .

I was going to introduce this by saying that I've been a fan of Spencer's journalism for years, but fan doesn't seem quite the right word. Maybe admirer is closer to it. Spencer's reporting over the years has tackled topics that hit particularly close to home for me: Questioning power and surveillance. Paying attention to - and calling others to pay attention to - grim and dirty truths of empire that we aren't supposed to talk about. It's work that I've always tried to do in my own stories. But obviously the tools and audiences and effects of journalism and comic book writing are pretty darn different. And it's always hearteningly impressive to watch someone who's very good at something so different from what you do tackle the same stuff you tackle. His recent book REIGN OF TERROR is a prime example.

Our subject for this interview, though, was DRAGON, the Ottoman-era Dracula graphic novel I co-created with Dave Acosta. (Remember that paid subscribers to Copper Bottle have access to a free PDF of DRAGON!) From the get, I imagined DRAGON as a story about power, violence, and suspicion with echoes of stuff happening right now. So it was pretty cool to talk about it with one of the premier national security reporters of our time.

Spoilers ahead!!!

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