On Thursday night at the New York Public Library's main branch, author-artist Mark Siegel helped open an exhibit based on his glorious graphic novel Sailor Twain: Or, the Mermaid in the Hudson (First Second/Macmillan). "Sailor Twain's New York: Secrets and Mysteries of the River Hudson" was designed by Matthew Knutzen, NYPL's geospatial librarian, as an exhibit to "extend the fiction" of Sailor Twain. 
Here Mark Siegel is pictured amid a group of fans fittingly decked out in steampunk attire in front of the exhibit in the NYPL map room (aka Room 117).
Sailor Twain began as a webcomic, which Siegel likened to a "modern serial." Six years into the nine-year project, he discovered a 2009 exhibit at the NYPL about mapping the Hudson. "Sailor Twain's New York" places several of those key maps alongside the events of Siegel's tale, featuring a sea captain who finds an injured mermaid in the Hudson River. Siegel insisted, "I'm not a mermaid geek," but in his daily travels from his home in Tarrytown, N.Y., to his job as founder and editor of First Second in New York City, he doodled his way through the train trips alongside the Hudson River. One day, an image emerged of a captain on the bow of a ship and a mermaid. Next, the French character Lafayette appeared. The son of a French mother and American father, Siegel said the two characters represented his two selves. He described the project as a scholarly undertaking, involving "inner research and outer research."
Siegel began seeing mermaids everywhere, and he spoke of the dangers of their siren song. His captain asks the mermaid not to sing. Siegel mentioned the influence of John Waterhouse's Ulysses and the Sirens (1891) as a powerful image--Ulysses strapped to the mast so he cannot react to the Sirens' song. "For Ahab, revenge is his mermaid," Siegel said, "for others, it's fame or addiction." He showed images of a mermaid in an ad for Yellow Tail wine, and the Starbucks logo. He also cited as powerful points of reference for his 19th-century story the abolitionist and suffragette movements. He rendered the images for Sailor Twain in charcoal (with a spray fix to minimize smudging)--an ideal medium to depict "the age of steam and coal," Siegel said. The exhibit runs through April 2013. --Jennifer M. Brown