The Amazon Bookstore’s Blog has an interview with Nick Abadzis, the creator of the graphic novel Laika, about the first Earthling/Russian/dog in space, aboard Sputnik 2. An excerpt:

Amazon.com: Was there anything that didn’t make it into the graphic novel because it just didn’t fit?

Nick Abadzis: There was quite a bit, actually. I could have done with another hundred pages. But I’d taken a bit of time to write and thumbnail it (which I do at the same time) and when that stage was finished, the publisher and I realized that the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launches was fast approaching. When I first pitched the idea to Mark Siegel at First Second, neither of us realized that it was so close. It felt like we needed to be a part of that, so I drew it extremely fast–two hundred pages in a little over eight months. It’s an understatement to say that it was extremely hard work.