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Sheena Dempsey’s time travelling penguins Pablo and Splash are a bit bonkers and a lot of fun. Visiting times and places that really appeal to Key Stage 2 learners these titles are a great addition to reading for pleasure graphic novel collections! As both author and illustrator Sheena has very kindly answered some questions for us about creating this dynamic duo and shared a few spreads from the original comic…

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Where on earth did the idea of two time travelling penguins come from?

Ha, good question! Pablo and Splash began as a webcomic that I made at the beginning of the first lockdown in 2020, which is thankfully becoming a distant memory now. I wanted to document my experience of lockdown through the medium of a diary comic but I didn’t want to get bogged down drawing eyes and legs and all those fiddly, hard-to-draw things that make comics so time-consuming. So I wondered to myself: which animal is cute, appealing and takes two seconds to draw? A penguin! I called the webcomic Isolation Penguin. After drawing about fifty episodes of these pandemic penguins in a domestic setting with my husband and I as main characters, I was asked by a publisher if I was doing anything with the characters. At that point, I began the journey of trying to turn it into something for the children’s graphic novel market. After a fairly weak first and failed attempt (and a rejection), I put the project on the back burner. But when I’d recovered from the sting of the rejection, I pulled it out and worked really hard on making a believable and lovable duo and I pushed myself to create a unique series idea. At first Professor O’Brain had several different gadgets, but my agent Sallyanne Sweeney read it and suggested I streamline it. The time travel thread of the professor’s work came to the fore and I realised: Oh, ‘time-travelling penguins” is actually the hook of the series.

It would be great to hear a bit about what you may have learned whilst writing these books about different historical periods?

I’m definitely not a history buff so I’ve learned tonnes. I found history very boring and confusing as a subject when I studied it in the junior cycle in secondary school and I opted out as soon as I had the chance. But I wonder if coming at it from this perspective might be a positive, because I know what’s interesting to children and what isn’t. I tend to cherry pick the fun historical details surrounding the way people (or dinosaurs!) lived that pique my interest and I write storylines around them, always bearing in mind Pablo and Splash’s distinct character traits and how they might be woven convincingly around these details. The toilet sponge in Ancient Rome that Splash accidentally uses to wipe her face springs to mind.

Is there a particular historical period that you’ve most enjoyed writing about?

There are lots more adventures to come for Pablo and Splash but out of the three that are currently published my favourite to write about was probably the Cretaceous Period. I find it fascinating that Earth was so different geographically back then and I can’t for the life of me get my head around the fact that dinosaurs really ruled the earth for such a long time. I don’t know that I’ll ever really comes to terms with it – enormous reptiles charging around the place still feels like the stuff of fantasy to me (not that I’m a flat earther or dinosaur denier or anything, I hasten to add!). Looking at illustrations of the Tylosaurus – the prehistoric marine reptile who Splash mistakes for a whale – made me feel a bit queasy. I would immediately combust from stress if I encountered one. Google at your peril!

What is your process for creating your illustrations? How does this work alongside your writing process?

Graphic novels are such an interesting and challenging form and I absolutely love them. But they are not for the faint-hearted or for those who want to live a life of balance. You really have to put your heart and soul into them. My process goes something like this:

First of all, I spend a few days figuring out quite a rough plot outline on Word. I send this to my editor Alex Antscherl and we bounce this back and forth a little bit. Then I proceed to the real writing and roughs in Procreate on my iPad Pro, bearing in mind Alex’s feedback. At this point, things might change from the plot outline and it’s important that I have freedom to improvise while I’m immersed in this part of the process as a lot of the story, jokes, character arcs etc. are figured out here. I try to make all the Pablo and Splash stories as funny as possible but truly funny jokes that work for children’s books are SO hard to write because there are so many no-go areas. However, I usually have about two or three jokes in a story that I find absolutely hilarious at the time I write them and that will give me good mileage to keep going. I write the dialogue into the bubbles while I’m drawing all the roughs and this part takes seven weeks and it’s very intense. The books are 240 pages long so I’m drawing and writing multiple pages per day. Once that part is done and I have feedback from the editorial and art teams, I start the colour art, which I make in Photoshop. This part takes about six or seven months.

How do you ensure the historical elements are as accurate as they can be when they involve penguins?

I suppose it’s a fine balance of suspending disbelief and remaining true to history as it really happened. Having two penguins toddling around outside of Antarctica in the first place is a bit of a stretch, then adding in a time machine and sending them to different historical time periods makes it all the more implausible (but fun!). Pablo and Splash interacting with medieval Irish monks has been a particularly funny one for me – stay tuned. For accuracy, my editor Alex has a great head for history, as does desk editor Jessica Bellman who does editing and fact-checking, so I have plenty of eyes on the series to catch any historical inaccuracies, which can lead to absurd but absolutely serious conversations that would sound insane to anyone working outside of children’s publishing.