Welcome to the Shelf Care Interview, an occasional conversation series where Booklist talks to book people. This Shelf Care Interview is sponsored by HarperCollins Children’s Books.

In this episode of Shelf Care Interview, Sarah Hunter talks to Johnnie Christmas about his first middle-grade comic, SWIM TEAM.

Johnnie Christmas is the number one New York Times best-selling and award-winning graphic novelist, who’s perhaps best known for co-creating Margaret Atwood series Angel Catbird and for adapting William Gibson’s lost screenplay for Alien 3 into a critically acclaimed graphic novel of the same name.

After gaining plenty of acclaim in the world of sci-fi and speculative comics for adults, he’s making the move into middle-grade comics with SWIM TEAM, the first of several projects for the age group. A graduate of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, Johnnie makes Vancouver, British Columbia his home.