Comics for Teaching Content
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It's Not Rocket Science
It's Not Rocket Science ... Oh. Wait. By Karen Green Wednesday October 5, 2011 06:00:00 am Our columnists are independent writers who choose subjects and write without editorial input from comiXology. The opinions expressed are the columnist's, and do not represent the opinion of comiXology. Full disclosure: I'm a bit of a procrastinator. The good folks at ComiXology who post these columns know this all too well, as I inevitably submit my work about 24 hours before it's supposed to run, as opposed to the five days specified in my contract (sorry, Peter!). And this column you're reading now was planned, oh, back in early July, then postponed until late September for promotional purposes, and now I'm writing it at the last minute (as usual) and most of what I'd planned to say is lost, lost in the mists of memory. Here's the scoop: I had the privilege of interviewing author Jim Ottaviani on the Graphic Novels Stage at the 2011 American Library Association meeting in New Orleans this past June. I was too caught up in the moment to take notes on all his answers, though, and I thought, "Oh, I'll ask him all this again via email." Erm… Then I thought—oh, I know: Jim is going to come talk at Columbia in October! I'll wait and write this column as a publicity device, giving me plenty of time to get in touch with him for background before then. Erm…. So, now, Ottaviani will be here at Columbia on Friday October 7 and there is no time to check back in with him, as he is on his whirlwind book tour, taking him to such Sacred Haunts of Science as MIT and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. -
Comic Creator Half the Length and Covers Three People
COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS him about the beauty of a flower being accessible to both the artist and the scientist in different ways, and how they add to each other. So the comic format is valid. Why did you decide not to present his life chronologically? We asked: what would Feynman do? In his books, Feynman wrote in short scenes and acts, presenting some things out of order. A continuous narrative — born, lived, died — did not serve the person or the story. So BOOKS SECOND AND L. MYRICK/FIRST J. OTTAVIANI using anecdotes seemed natural. Choos- ing the anecdotes, choosing when to break the continuity, that was when it got more difficult. Our intention was to make him seem more human. The words and pictures in your book tell different aspects of the story. Why did you choose such a challenging format? Leland and I assumed that the readership would be willing to read both the words and the pictures. We wanted to bring something new, to enrich the experience. Otherwise, why do another book about Feynman? We wanted to go beyond James Gleick’s 1992 book Genius or Feynman’s own stories. Jim Ottaviani’s comic-strip biography of Richard Feynman conveys the physicist’s colourful personality. What is the subject of your next book? It is aimed at a young readership, and is about primatologists Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas, with a good Q&A Jim Ottaviani helping of their mentor Louis Leakey. The book is targeted at readers aged between 10 and 12, mainly girls. It is nowhere near as in-depth as Feynman, because it is about Comic creator half the length and covers three people. -
Pdf, Accessed 20 July 2009
SISSA – International School for Advanced Studies Journal of Science Communication ISSN 1824 – 2049 http://jcom.sissa.it/ RECEIVED: November 21, 2008 PUBLISHED: November 18, 2009 Article Science comics as tools for science education and communication: a brief, exploratory study M. Tatalovic ABSTRACT: Comics are a popular art form especially among children and as such provide a potential medium for science education and communication. In an attempt to present science comics in a museum exhibit I found many science themed comics and graphic books. Here I attempt to provide an overview of already available comics that communicate science, the genre of ‘science comics’. I also provide a quick literature review for evidence that comics can indeed be efficiently used for promoting scientific literacy via education and communication. I address the issue of lack of studies about science comics and their readers and suggest some possible reasons for this as well as some questions that could be addressed in future studies on the effect these comics may have on science communication. 1. Objective As part of a preparation for an international exhibit of science comics in the new science and technology museum in Rijeka, Croatia, I searched for comics books that aim to communicate science. The main objectives were to identify if there are any science comics and to do an exploratory overview of these comics and to provide a brief review of literature on potential uses of these comics in science education and communication. 2. Context Comics (sequential art) have been generally underrated as a medium and an art form, and in the Anglo- Saxon world they are frequently thought of as nothing more than a cheap pastime. -
Presents Books from GT Labs
LORA FOUNTAIN & ASSOCIATES LITERARY AGENCY presents books from G.T. Labs T-Minus: The Race to the Moon by Jim Ottaviani, Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon Everybody always talked about the moon, but nobody ever did anything about it. That is, until a Frenchman named Jules Verne wrote a science fiction novel called From the Earth to the Moon in 1865 and did the math that showed how to get there, a Russian named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky checked Verne's figures and decided that liquid-fueled multistage rockets were the way to go, and an American named Robert Goddard started building and flying 'em. T-Minus tells you what happens when you take two global superpowers, dozens of daring pilots, thousands of engineers and scientists, and then point them at the night sky and say "Go!?" So join the whole world as it counts down to sending the first men to the moon, and discover the story of the people who made it happen, both in the rockets and behind the scenes. About the storytellers: Cartoonists Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon have been together as a studio since 2004. Their work includes Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards, The Stuff of Life (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008), and Top Ten (DC Comics, 2008). They live and work in Minneapolis, Minnesota and claim to be card- carrying members of the International Cartoonist Conspiracy. In addition to being the author of the New York Times #1 Bestseller Feynman, all of Jim Ottaviani's books have been nominated for multiple awards, including Eisners & ALA Popular Paperback of the Year. -
The Seeing Eye of Scientific Graphic Biography
THE SEEING EYE OF SCIENTIFIC GRAPHIC BIOGRAPHY CANDIDA RIFKIND Several recent graphic biographies tell the stories of the early days of nuclear research, from the discovery of radioactivity in the 1890s to the United States atomic bomb testings of the 1950s.1 Some are both celebratory and complex, such as Jim Ottaviani and Lelan Myrick’s colorful Feynman (2011), a full bi- ography of the larger-than-life American theoretical physicist, educator, and writer Richard Feynman. Ottaviani and Myrick use his famous Feynman Diagrams, which look like squiggly line drawings, as a motif throughout the book so that science meets art to depict the life of a man who thinks in pic- tures. In a quite different mode, Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (2010) is a double biography of the private and professional lives of this famous pair of chemists. Redniss incorporates cartoons, drawings, photographs, diagrams, and words into a visual-verbal collage of the discovery of radium. She also extends beyond the Curies’ life- spans to depict how their discovery of radioactivity eventually led to theories of the nuclear atom, the development of the atomic bomb, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Nuclear history personalized through the lives of scientists is also the theme of two graphic biographies that focus on Robert Oppenheimer: Jim Ottavi- ani’s collaboration with seven illustrators in Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard and the Political Science of the Atom Bomb (2001) and Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb (2012).