James Vining “First In Space”
When you’re coming up with ideas for comics, the words “chimpanzee” and “outer space” conjure up all sorts of wacky images. They certainly did for creator James Vining, who found himself examining all the possibilities after combining the two in an impromptu drawing during his time in the Coast Guard.
“It was a bit of an accident,” said Vining. “I made a doodle of a surly chimp in a space suit and wrote ‘first in space’ next to it on the white board on the ship I was stationed on.”
Vining originally tried to dream up a crazy science fiction story, but those ideas never took him anywhere satisfactory. It wasn’t until he began to research the true story of chimpanzees in space — that being NASA’s early space program in which chimps were trained and vied for the prime spot of being on the first “manned” US flight into space— that everything began to come together.
In Vining’s resulting graphic novel, “First in Space,” the focus is primarily on the history of the early space program, but through the experience the unlikely heroes who worked towards the celestial conquest — Gordon Cooper’s gotten enough glory, this story focuses on a chimp named Ham. In Vining’s view, the spectacle of the space program sometimes glosses over the smaller moments that contain stories worth telling.
“The devil’s in the details,” said Vining. “Great to know that we went to the moon in 1969, but a LOT went into that adventure.”
Vining points to the recent documentary “ In the Shadow of the Moon” as a thematic cousin of his work. The extended footage of Neil Armstong’s walk on the moon reveals the kind of moments that fascinate Vining — the moments before the legendary and rehearsed line he utter — and propel a larger tale through a smaller canvas
“The hesitation before he makes the leap, where he surveys the alien environment, really adds the level of humanity that the mythologized and truncated version lacks,” said Vining.
And it’s humanity that Vining is after in “First in Space,’ even through its central character is a chimpanzee being used in a laboratory testing situation but is building relationships as his participation serves a larger purpose, right or wrong.
“The thing to remember about the animal testing in the space program — the chimps in particular — is that the men who cared for them and trained them had a difficult job,” said Vining. “They loved those animals and it always affected them deeply whenever something happened to them, in spite of their efforts to be clinical or detached when dealing with them. Only a monster would be unaffected by these chimps who were, essentially, like little kids.”
“First in Space” also has the advantage of being remarkably kid friendly while not talking down to the readers — or simplifying the situations. Vining says that he never intentionally wrote a book for kids, but he did consider that they would read it and he hoped to offer something that excited any reader about history.
“The glossed over version we learn in school doesn’t help us when history starts repeating itself,” said Vining. “You have to know a little more about the mechanics of how the Nazis came to power in the ’30s, for example, to really appreciate how scary the world is right now. Plus history is interesting, and better than most fiction. You can’t make this stuff up if you tried.”
Vining notes that comic books have recently been looking to history and science for its stories and much of that has been kid-friendly. Vining himself was a big history buff when he was a kid and it was always the teachers who told the stories he couldn’t find in school books that he loved the most.
Perhaps graphic novels like “First in Space” are Vining’s way of continuing that work in his own way.
“I would love to hear that kids go out and learn more about space history after reading ‘First in Space,’” said Vining. “I’d love it even more if they said, “I wonder what else I don’t know about history” and start digging into other things as well.”
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