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Op-Ed: Energy Cycles: Nadja Spiegelman Explains the Creation of Zig and Wikki’s Latest Book

“So I want you to write an early reader children’s comic book about the nitrogen cycle and how all things in nature are symbiotically interconnected,” my mother (and editor at TOON Books), Francoise Mouly, said to me on the phone. I’d been trying to write about recycling: Alien pals Zig and Wikki land in a recycling bin—what happens next?! But the What Happens Next was simply too depressing (they get shipped overseas and sold to China, who then sells them back to us as manufactured recycled goods, wasting an enormous amount of energy in the process). Somehow, the nitrogen cycle seemed easier to explain.

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