On the morning of June 17, 1928, Amelia Earhart went down to the harbor in Trepassey, Newfoundland, where a crowd of reporters waited to see if she would finally make good on her attempt to become the first woman to cross the Atlantic by plane. It was a clear day and there was a promising, brisk tail wind out of the west.

For three weeks, Earhart and a pilot named Bill Stultz had been marking time in Trepassey, a sparsely populated fishing village on Newfoundland's southeast coast, trying to get a Fokker F.VII plane called the Friendship off the ground. A combination of aborted efforts and poor weather had kept them in the village day after day, and nerves were running high. Stultz would actually pilot the plane; Earhart, then 30, would be the passenger, which would make her the first woman to ever cross the Atlantic if they succeeded.

The frustration of not being able to leave -- in a log she kept, Earhart said, “Job had nothing on us. We are just managing to keep from suicide” -- was compounded by the knowledge that not one, but two women besides Earhart were also trying to make the transatlantic flight at the same time. Could Earhart and Stultz beat the other women? And even if they were able to get out of the harbor, could they survive the dangerous crossing? That tense period in 1928, a little more than a year after Charles Lindbergh made the first solo flight across the Atlantic, is at the heart of the new graphic novel, Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean, which is written by Sarah Stewart Taylor and illustrated by Ben Towle. (Hyperion)

The book is the fourth in a series of biographies for children ages 9 to 14 that have been published by Hyperion Books in collaboration with The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction. It is also the first graphic novel for Taylor, the 38-year old novelist who lives in Hartland and has written the Sweeney St. George mystery series.

A former reporter for this paper and freelance journalist before turning to fiction, Taylor is married to Matt Dunne, a Google executive and former state representative and senator, who is bidding to win the Democratic primary for governor this fall; the couple have two young sons, and are expecting a third child this summer.

“It was a completely new process,” said Taylor, interviewed at the Tucker Box Cafe in downtown White River Junction. “It was the first time I'd written a script for a graphic novel.”

Articulate and passionate about her subject, Taylor talked about Earhart, writing and the process of collaborating with award-winning cartoonist Ben Towle, who lives in North Carolina and whose previous graphic novel, Midnight Sun, was about an ill-fated Italian airship expedition to the North Pole, also in 1928. The two will officially meet for the first time today when they will be at the Center for Cartoon Studies at 4 p.m. to discuss the book in a talk that is free to the public.

Over a nine-month period, they exchanged e-mails on how to how to flesh out the details of the graphic novel, with Towle working on one segment of the story at a time. “It was amazing to see how he was able to transform what was in my head,” Taylor said. The panels are done in aquamarine, black and white, the images register immediately and cleanly, and the words are succinct and evocative.

Although Taylor had experience writing screenplays, the job of writing the text (the script, in graphic novel lingo) proved to be more challenging and quite different from what she'd expected. “You have to figure out how to get emotion across in a static medium,” Taylor said. The process involved translating words into images, and then stripping away excess language to pare the script, and story, down to its essence. She worked closely with Towle, cartoonist and editor Jason Lutes and Cartoon School founder James Sturm. “I want to stress how collaborative a process it is. (The book is) not by one person,” she said.

Towle, interviewed by phone from his home in Winston-Salem, N.C., said that one of his main concerns as a cartoonist was establishing the period and place in a way that was realistic but not overly obsessed with smaller details. “When you get down to it, I'm generally less concerned with making every door fixture looks authentic, but that (the period) has an authentic look and feel,” he said.

“One thing I really like about the whole (Hyperion biographical) series is that instead of taking this Hollywood biopic approach ... they latch on to some kind of pressure cooker moment in the person's life ... to reveal ... character,” he said. In Earhart's case, the quality of her character is revealed in her stoic response to the agony of waiting for the right conditions to present themselves in Trepassey, and her ability to seize the moment when it came.

For Taylor, the hardest part of the project may have been understanding the rather elusive Amelia Earhart herself. When Sturm approached Taylor about writing one of the biographies in the series, he asked her who she'd be interested in tackling. Taylor had some women in mind, among them the photographer Dorothea Lange and Earhart. The response to the idea of Earhart was immediate. But as Taylor began researching the woman about whom so much has been written, she found that Earhart's character was, in fact, tough to pin down.

“One of the challenges was how to write about her,” Taylor said. “I started out assuming I was going to focus on her disappearance. But as I read more and more about her, I got more and more interested in that ... period in Newfoundland.”

What particularly struck her, she said, was that this was “the moment she became an icon.”       

A further challenge was how to make this icon come alive for the girls and boys who would read the book. “She was a quintessential Wasp,” Taylor said. “She did not wear emotions on her sleeve.”

Her father, to whom Earhart was devoted, was a lawyer, who moved the family around the country; he was also an alcoholic. Born in Atchison, Kan., in 1897, Earhart eventually moved to California and then back to the East Coast with her mother, with whom she lived into her 20s.

“My sense of her was that she was someone who created this kind of shell to protect herself,” Taylor observed. She wasn't particularly given, in the modern psychological sense, to introspection or expression of doubts -- at least not in the written record she left behind. She was a creature of action.

In a way, Taylor continued, who Amelia Earhart was as a person is not the point. Her significance stems from what she represented to young women. “She was so conscious of herself as a role model,” Taylor said. “She'd literally encouraged women to take on things they'd never done before.”

With that in mind, Taylor created a character named Grace, a young girl and Trepassey resident who is swept up in the excitement of the flight. Grace wants to grow up to be a journalist in a time when there were very few women journalists, and she is there on that June morning to witness the Friendship as it lifts uncertainly into the sky. Grace takes inspiration from Earhart's poise and bravery and goes on to forge her own career as a reporter. It was from such incremental steps, Taylor noted, that progress in women's rights was made. “For Grace, just moving away from the small town was a huge victory,” she observed.

Earhart wasn't the only woman pilot or the first woman pilot, and she wasn't even the most expert pilot, said Taylor, but she was the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane. (In 1932, she became the first woman pilot to make a solo non-stop transatlantic flight.) Prior to her, no woman had ever been a passenger on a transatlantic flight; it was judged too dangerous. And although Stultz was the pilot for most of the flight, it was Earhart who “brought all her skills to bear” on the organization and planning of the journey, Taylor said.

She made the risky but correct decision to dump fuel just before the flight to ensure that the plane was light enough to take off (even though it left them with only just enough fuel, and no margin for error, to get to Ireland) and she took control of the plane for a short time during the flight.

Twenty hours and 40 minutes after take-off, the Friendship touched down in Wales, having overshot Ireland. Earhart made headlines around the world.

If circumstances hadn't sidelined the other two women racing to beat her to the prize, Earhart might have been a minor footnote in history. But the first is the first, and has that distinction for eternity. And, like Lindbergh before her, and in a country that prizes innovation, risk-taking and celebrity, she became a national heroine and star overnight.

For more information on the talk by Taylor and Towle at the Center for Cartoon Studies, go to www.cartoonstudies.org or call 802-295-3319.

Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.