HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE
 
 
My mother taught me to read at the age of three—in part by reading me Walt Disney Comics. I never stopped (and was consequently appalled when I ran into Dick and Jane in kindergarten. Flipped through See Spot Run and put it back, wondering—aloud—why anybody would want to read that? I was not a diplomatic child).
 
Twenty-odd years later, I read a rather sub-par Disney story, though, and spurred by the reckless notion that surely I could write better than that, I sent a medium-rude letter to the editor of said comic line, essentially saying, “Dear Sir—I’ve been reading your Walt Disney Comics for twenty-five years now, and they’ve been getting worse and worse. I don’t know that I could do better myself, but I’d like to try.”
 
Evidently age had taught me nothing about diplomacy, but I did have the luck to have written to Del Connell, a true gent with a sense of humor, who wrote back to me and said, “OK. Try.”
 
So I did. Del didn’t buy my first story, but he did something much more valuable: He told me what was wrong with it. He did buy my second story (my first fiction sale ever; I literally bounced off the walls when I got his letter with the contract), and I wrote scripts for Disney for several years: Uncle Scrooge, the Beagle Boys, Daisy and Donald, Big Bad Wolf and Three Little Pigs, even the occasional Mickey Mouse story (I always preferred the ducks; Mickey was too much the straight arrow to be a really interesting character).
 
Eventually, the comics program stopped buying new scripts (someone at headquarters, having suddenly realized that they had forty years of Carl Barks scripts in the files, thought to ask why they were paying for new stories instead of simply reprinting those?), Disney sold their comics license, and I moved on to other things. But once a lover of comic books...
 
And so, when (years later) I had a literary agent and novels to my name, I told said agent that IF the opportunity to write a graphic novel should ever come along, I would seize it with both hands. And thus when a production company contracted for a movie option of my novels, I insisted that we must include an exemption in the option contract, since comic books would normally be covered under the “merchandising” clause—so that IF someone happened to come along and offer me the chance to write a graphic novel...
 
Well, one month later, someone did. That was Betsy Mitchell, the wonderful editor of the book you’re holding. “I don’t want a straight adaptation of Outlander,” she said to me. “I want a new Jamie and Claire story, set within the parameters of Outlander.”
 
“Well, that’s a cool challenge,” I said, scratching my head. “What if…?” So the story you’re holding here begins slightly before Outlander, and is essentially the story as told from the point of view of Jamie’s godfather, Murtagh. If you’ve read Outlander, you’ll recognize some of the major events, but you’ll also see a completely new storyline woven through them—all the things Claire didn’t see or know about—as well as getting Murtagh’s unexpurgated opinions of the whole affair.
 
Through Betsy’s auspices, I found Hoang Nguyen, the magnificent artist who drew the story from my script, and the wonderful team of production people who’ve made this book a visual marvel.
 
So you and I have a lot of people to thank for this: Betsy and Hoang, Catherine MacGregor and Catherine-Ann MacPhee (who supplied the Gaelic), Russell Galen (my literary agent), Del Connell—and my mother. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
 
Yours truly,
 
Diana Gabaldon