Antarctic Hero: New graphic novel delves into incredible story of Kerry explorer Tom Crean

Over 20 years ago, Michael Smith wrote the definitive biography of Tom Crean. He has now captured the explorer's life in a graphic novel 

Michael Smith, and the cover of Tom Crean: Irish Antarctic Hero.

Just as the story of Tom Crean, a farmer’s son from Co Kerry who left school early to enlist in the Royal Navy, is bound up with with two of the great explorers of the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration, Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Henry Shackleton, so is the story of author and journalist Michael Smith with Crean. The Kerryman might have remained a largely overlooked figure were it not for Smith’s tenacity and curiosity. Smith wrote the book on Crean, An Unsung Hero (2002). 

“I was particularly drawn to Tom Crean because nobody had written about him,” Smith relates. “He was very much overlooked and forgotten. And hence, the title of the book.