How did you go from creating picture books to this serious young adult graphic novel?

In 2011 when my grandmother passed away, we found two documents among her belongings. One was about my grandfather’s time in the Resistance and the things he experienced with his good friend Fritz, who ended up being arrested and executed, and the other was a minute-by-minute description of the bombing of their house. Reading those documents moved me tremendously, and I remember talking to my agent, Steven Malk, in 2011 and saying, “I really feel like there’s a book here somewhere.” He encouraged me to do it, but it took me quite some time to figure out what that would look like.

How did you move from those two documents to this much bigger story?

I started with research. I reached out to Fritz’s son, and I started going to the Amsterdam city archives and digging through their files and photos. My grandfather and Fritz had been sort of sideways involved with a bank heist, which when I found the documents in 2016 was not a very well-known story. There’s been a movie about it since [The Resistance Banker]. As I was digging, I became really struck by the role that artists and women had played during this heist, and that was an angle that had largely remained hidden. Even in that movie, the story is very much told from the male perspective and from the bank’s perspective. As I started looking at that story from the perspective of these young artists, especially this one young woman, I realized that is the angle that I was going to take.