Science Comics Summer

Just a few years ago I was giving talks trying to convince scientists that comics could be an ideal format to communicate their research. Now, it looks like there aren’t many people left to convince! The reason for my long silence here is that this Summer I have received 3 independent commissions for nonfiction comics. Let me use this space to tell you a bit more about them:

• Academy of Science Hamburg – this German institution actually has already commissioned me 2 comic ‘posters’ one about neuroinflammation with Charlotte Schubert and the latest one about Alex Steen‘s work on Automated Reasoning, which was definitively new territory for me.

• University of California Merced – as part of their amazing Bobcat comics series I have worked on a comic with Dalia Magaña comparing ‘war’ and ‘journey’ metaphors in cancer discourse, and another comic for Meredith Van Natta on the Medical Legal Violence that uninsured people (especially immigrants) have to face in order to access healthcare in the US. These are both such important projects, that touch on so many things close to my heart (metaphors, medicine, and social justice) and I really enjoyed workshopping visual metaphors with these thinkers. If you’re local I’m also flying there for a panel on November 14.

• NIH CARD – I still can’t reveal much about this project but suffice it to say that it was written in collaboration with the amazing Paige Jarreu and it’s meant as a short introduction to research into genetic markers of neurodegeneration (not an easy subject to summarize, since it spans so many scales).

I am delighted that I’m finally getting commissions for non-fiction comics. For most of my career, illustration/animation has been my main source of income, and comics remained mostly a personal passion project.

This whole experience reminded me how much I love this medium, and I believe that comics can do even more than make science fun and accessible. The combination of words and pictures can help us visualize complex ideas and structure our thinking in deeper ways. I really want to push myself to go beyond communication and to do some more graphic scholarship.

In particular, there is a book that I have been slowly writing over the years, and I think it’s finally time for me to start drawing it. I am thinking of serializing the first few chapters on my Patreon (which has been very dormant so far). Sign up now if you want to follow along!

Christmas (Island) special

Christmas is upon us and I realised that I have been so busy this year (between my new research project and my new books) that I didn’t have time to draw any short stories, which have always been my favourite format. So, when I learnt about the troubles of Christmas Island on the new Planet Earth (and later discovered that the story is even more complicated) I decided that it was time for a little personal project. This short comic is the result, it’s inspired by science – because of course it is – but I hope it can also be read as fiction and enjoyed regardless of the science. However, if you do want to know more of the biology here is all all the info you need. Happy holidays!

NOTE: Available also on Medium, with larger images.

 

Alexander von Humboldt

The Prussian scientist Alexander von Humboldt has occupied a special place in my heart since I read Andrea Wulf‘s The Invention of Nature last year. Before then the name Humboldt had a vaguely familiar sound, probably because of the many places and species named after him, but I admit that I knew almost nothing about the fascinating man behind it.

Sure enough, he was another privileged white man, but he was a pretty good one at that. More than 200 years ago he openly spoke against slavery, supported the independence of the American colonies and he had little patience for kings and emperors. He preferred to travel the world, cataloguing species, rather than enjoying the comforts of the court and even when on the verge of bankruptcy he always helped young scientists with the little money he had. His work inspired some of my personal heroes, like Darwin and Haeckel, but also writers like Goethe and Thoreau. And yet, he has been almost completely forgotten outside the scientific community. This is probably for many complex reasons, but as Wulf explains mostly because:

He was one of the last polymaths, and died at a time when scientific disciplines were hardening into tightly fenced and more specialised fields. Consequently his more holistic approach – a scientific method that included art, history, poetry and politics alongside hard data – has fallen out of favour. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there was little room for a man whose knowledge had bridged a vast range of subjects. As scientists crawled into their narrow areas of expertise, dividing and further subdividing, they lost Humboldt’s interdisciplinary methods and his concept of nature as a global force.

In brief, he didn’t make any single revolutionary discovery but he profoundly changed the way we think about nature . While he was alive, Humboldt was an international celebrity and – in my opinion – an excellent example of the role scientists should have in society. When he died (on this day in 1859) the whole world mourned his loss. This is why I have decided to take some time off my other projects and remember him, in my own way.

I want to encourage others to discover Humboldt and I hope that, maybe, his story could inspire some scientists to ‘crawl’ out of their niches and follow his vision. We badly need more like him.

Visual Narratives For Science Communication

I have a little announcement to make, so please allow me an unusually long post.

When I decided to become a freelance cartoonist in 2013, after finishing my PhD, I never seriously considered returning to academia. I simply didn’t think there would be an institution that would accommodate – even less support – my strange mix of interests. And probably there wasn’t, until Columbia University created the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience (PSSN for short) with the ambitious goal of creating:

a new paradigm for interdisciplinary university-sponsored research to advance understanding of mind, brain, and behavior, and the social foundations and consequences of new neuroscientific findings.

I only discovered the program in September 2015, when I first travelled to New York, and I just couldn’t believe my luck. The PSSN postdoc seemed like the position of my dreams and the next round of submission was only a few months away. I immediately started working on a proposal titled ‘Visual Narratives for Science Communication‘ and thinking of ways to bridge the gap between the apparently  distant worlds of science and comics.

The good news is that my proposal was accepted! This means that I will have the chance to fully develop this interdisciplinary project and explore how we can use visual narratives to communicate science. I think the proliferation of science-inspired cartoons, animations and webcomics already proves their great potential, but as a scientist I want to go deeper and try to understand the cognitive mechanisms behind visual narrative communication.

Because I think scientists need new communication tools and I believe comics can help us. My hope is that soon they will not be considered just some ‘funny’ way to talk about science but an essential tool for science education. I hope one day to see a professional community of science cartoonists just like the community of science journalists we have today.

Finally – and this is one of the main reasons for me to write this post – I want to make clear that I can’t do this alone. We need interdisciplinary answers for interdisciplinary problems. Luckily, over the past years, I have already met many brilliant people, from many different fields, willing to support me. But I’m sure there are more out there who can contribute to this new emerging field. So, if you are interested in this project, whether you are a scientist, a journalist, a cartoonist, a designer, or any combination of these and much more… please DO get in touch. I’d love to hear from you, what you think and how we can collaborate.

I have big plans and more news will follow soon but in the meanwhile thank you all for supporting my work. I hope you will join me on this new adventure.