Philip Pullman is the internationally acclaimed author of many books for children and adults. His trilogy His Dark Materials has been published in more than forty languages, has sold close to 17.5 million copies worldwide, and won innumerable awards and accolades. The Golden Compass was named an "All-Time Greatest Novel" by Entertainment Weekly and a "Top 100 Book of All Time" by Newsweek. The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship is his first original graphic novel. Fred Fordham first discovered comics after reading Marjane Satrapi s Persepolis. That book sparked an interest in the form generally but particularly in the French Bande Dessinee tradition. His first graphic novel, Nightfall, was published in France. He has also written and illustrated strips for David Lloyd's online comics-art magazine, Aces Weekly, and worked as an illustrator for The Phoenix comic."