Good Reading for Kids caught up with SHEENA DEMPSEY to discuss Pablo and Splash: Frozen in Time, the latest instalment in the hilarious kids’ graphic novel series about time-travelling penguins.

What sparked the idea for your latest book Pablo and Splash: Frozen in Time?

Well, I knew that Pablo and Splash were going to go back to Professor O’Brain’s lab to visit her because she asks them to at the end of the first book. I thought: Wouldn’t it be mysterious if the professor wasn’t there when they arrived. My next thought was that the TimeBender is always causing trouble so it must have something to do with her absence. And it kind of went from there. I had chosen the Ice Age as a potential location at the same time that I was developing the pitch for the series a couple of years ago so that idea was there from very early on.

Why did you choose to tell Pablo and Splash’s story as a graphic novel? What do you think makes this format special for young readers?

I chose to use graphic novels to tell the story of Pablo and Splash because I’m completely in love with comics as a format for storytelling. You can have endless fun on the page – you can arrange the panels in any formation that suits your story and use fun sound and action effects like BANG! And WHOOSH! You can wow your reader with big double paged spreads, which have lots of impact. You can slow down or speed up your story depending on how you lay out your page and they are really just tons of fun to make. They are a LOT of work though, as you have to draw thousands of pictures per book.

Pablo and Splash time travel to the Ice Age. Did you learn any interesting facts about this period of time?

Fun fact: History was my worst subject at school. Even though I have historians in my family, for some reason I found it hard to get my head around things that happened in the past as a child. However as an adult I find it incredibly fun to research time periods, but they have to pique my interest. I love the Ice Age because of the interesting geographical details like Earth being mostly covered with ice and sea levels being lower. I also love the idea of now extinct animals like sabre toothed tiger and woolly mammoth roaming freely. I learned that an area called Doggerland existed between Eastern Britain and mainland Europe when sea levels were lower. It was populated by migrating hunter gatherers during the last major ice age, but they were flooded out when glaciers melted and sea levels rose.

If you could time travel with Pablo and Splash, what period would you travel to? And who would you want to meet?

I’d love to see what the Age of Exploration was like in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. I find Shackleton and Sir John Franklin’s expeditions to the South and North poles darkly fascinating. The limit of human endurance that these explorers willingly pushed themselves to is amazing to me. I’d have to be watching their attempts from the safety of the heated TimeBender though as, like Splash, I really don’t like the cold. I would also be tempted to intervene at the point where the explorers eat penguins to stay alive!

Are there more adventures planned for Pablo and Splash?

Yes! At the moment I’m working on the colour art for the third book in the series, which sees our heroes go on a quest to visit Ancient Rome to find a gladiator’s helmet. Frenemy Benji challenges them to bring one back as proof of their time travelling adventures and Splash decides they MUST get one to finally prove they are telling the truth.

Describe this book in three words.

Chilly, wormy, silly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sheena Dempsey is an illustrator and author from Cork living by the sea in Folkestone, Kent with her husband, Mick, and their greyhound, Jeremy. She’s a graduate of Kingston University with an MA in Illustration (class of 2010).

Visit Sheena Dempsey’s website