Like a superhero: Local comic book artist nominated for award

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: FRANCIS SIEBERT
Londoner Diana Tamblyn, 42, is working on the second volume of her two-volume graphic novel biography of Gerald Bull, a Canadian ballistics engineer who was assassinated in 1990 while designing weaponry for the Iraqi government.

When she was about six years old, Diana Tamblyn found a box filled with comic books from the ‘50s and ‘60s that belonged to her mother and uncles. From then on, she was hooked.

“It was like striking gold,” the London native said. “I thought that was the most fabulous thing I’d ever come across.”

Thirty years later, Tamblyn’s own graphic novel From Earth to Babylon: Gerald Bull and the Supergun has been nominated for a Joe Shuster Award, which is named after one of the creators of Superman to honour Canadian comic books.

From Earth to Babylon tells the story of Gerald Bull, a Canadian ballistics engineer whose lifelong dream of launching satellites into space using long-range artillery came to an abrupt end when he was killed in 1990. Bull was walking down a hallway leading to his apartment in Brussels, Belgium one evening when an assassin fired two rounds in the back of his head. At the time of his death, the 62-year-old engineer was working for Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq, developing weaponry. The murder remains unsolved to this day.

Tamblyn’s interest in the story came from her grandaunt who was Bull’s secretary in Quebec after the Second World War.

“I grew up hearing stories about him,” she said. “She was very fond of him. It was her favourite job she ever had.”

The Canadian and American governments were not interested in Bull’s idea of launching satellites into space using artillery – they preferred rockets. When the two governments cut his research funding, Bull founded his own company, Space Research Corporation Near, in Quebec. In 1980, however, Bull spent six months in an American prison for selling ammunition to South Africa, violating a United Nations arms embargo on the country.

After his release, Bull moved to Brussels, developing weaponry for a number of countries, such as China, Israel and Iraq.

While there were already books, documentaries and a movie about Bull, Diana said she didn’t feel like any of them captured the story of him as person all that well.

“That’s why I decided to do it,” she said.

It took Diana four years to research, draw, write and rewrite the book. The 88-page graphic novel, which is the first volume of a two-volume series, was published in late 2013. She is currently working on the second volume, which she says she hopes to publish in 2016.

“I’m very proud of her,” Louise Tamblyn, Diana’s mother, said of her daughter’s award nomination. “She always loved [comic books]. A favourite outing for her was to go to the comic book store on Saturday. We would do the grocery shopping, which of course she didn’t enjoy particularly, but then if we ended the day with a trip to the comic book store, that made it all OK.”

Diana said the nomination was great but unexpected. She had forgotten about it until someone congratulated her over Facebook, she said.

“Superman is my favourite superhero,” Diana said. “So, there’s a lot of meaning in that for me.”