Headline artwork by Maris Wicks

There was a time when “science comic” meant a straightforward collection of pictures with a lot of captions and a few word balloons. The main character would recite a series of facts and definitions, and any attempt at plot or character development would be interrupted by a lecture. The comics featured more diagrams than action scenes, with clunky and expository dialogue. Rather than comics making science enjoyable, science made comics boring.

Not anymore. The new generation of science graphic novels is designed as much to entertain as to educate. “The students love to read the books on their own,” says Kat Kan, librarian at St. John’s Catholic School in Panama City, FL, and a graphic novel specialist for the library supply and services company Brodart. On the other hand, she says, some teachers are reluctant to use them in class.

“We certainly hope science comics will find their way into classrooms and be useful,” says Dave Roman, editor of First Second’s Science Comics line, “but not as replacements for traditional texts or lessons so much as the most fun supplement possible.” Roman, the creator of the “Astronaut Academy” fictional graphic novels (First Second, 2011), remembers his own childhood experience of watching a cartoon called Donald in Mathmagic Land, starring Donald Duck. “[It] not only visually explained difficult concepts for my brain to keep up with, but also incorporated a lot of humor that helped keep me from stressing out,” he says.

“I think you have to be very careful when doing things for kids that you don’t kill it for them,” says Francoise Mouly, publisher and editorial director of Toon Books. “They are overwhelmingly motivated by the sheer pleasure principle. That’s how they learn everything. You don’t say to your baby, ‘You must stand up and walk.’ [Babies are] curious, they want to move around, and they somehow figure out how to walk. It’s the same thing with communicating: [Kids] are always exploring, so you have to present the material in a way that encourages that.”

Let me tell you a story…

Many of the new breed of science graphic novels wrap the science into a story, and Natalie Layne, supervisor of children’s services at the Public Library of Brookline, MA, says the most popular science comics in her collection are story-driven titles such as Maris Wicks’s Human Body Theater (First Second, 2015); Primates (Square Fish, 2013) by Jim Ottaviani and Wicks; and Gene Luen Yang and Mike Holmes’s “Secret Coders” (First Second). Paige Braddock’s “Stinky Cecil” books (Andrews McMeel, 2015, 2016), whimsical stories about life among pond creatures, circulate particularly well in her library, she says.

“Human beings are a storytelling species,” says Yang. “Our brains crave stories. They are the easiest way for us to receive and remember information.”

Gene Luen Yang & Mike Holmes's "Secret Coders: Paths and Portals"

Set in a private school, “Secret Coders” uses a series of mysteries and a bit of magic to explain coding. “I first learned to code when I was in the fifth grade,” Yang says. “I immediately fell in love because it seemed a lot like magic. Think about how magic usually works in books and movies: You say a few esoteric words and then something amazing happens. Coding is basically the same, right? You type in a few esoteric words and something amazing happens. Mike and I hope to convey that same sense of magic through ‘Secret Coders.’”

In order to do that, Yang was careful to balance the narrative and the educational aspects of the story. “I tried hard to make sure they supported each other,” he says. “For example, when my main characters learn about ‘if’ statements, a foundational coding concept, they’re also learning about why the main bad guy is so evil.”

Sometimes the science is less central to the story. In the “Stinky Cecil” titles, the pond creatures go on improbable adventures, and the facts are included offhandedly along the way. Reggie the fly, for instance, is occasionally foiled by his five-day life span: He has a tendency to die just as the action is getting started. (Not a tragedy—Reggie is always reincarnated a day or so later.)

How we did it

One type of narrative that fits the graphic novel format especially well is the story of how a particular scientific or engineering milestone was achieved. An early example, now sadly out of print, is Tadashi Katoh’s manga Project X: Cup Noodle (Digital Manga, 2006), which brought drama and excitement to the quest to put shelf-stable noodles and shrimp into a cup that could also serve as a bowl.

In T-Minus: The Race to the Moon (Aladdin, 2009), writer Ottaviani and artists Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon tell the story of the space race from both the American and the Russian points of view, focusing on a few characters to keep continuity in the story. While the story is very compressed, the creators make it easier to track the progress of the technology by depicting different rockets and missions in the margins, with information such as time of flight and accomplishments that would have been tedious to include in the story. Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb (Hill & Wang, 2012) focuses on the Manhattan Project, another story with strong characters and an element of competition.

Biographies of scientists include their work as a necessary part of the story; in Ottaviani and Leland Purvis’s biography of Alan Turing, The Imitation Game: Alan Turing Decoded (left; Abrams, 2016), for example, the authors show Turing developing his ideas and expanding on them, presenting complicated concepts one step at a time.

Just give it to me straight

Even a fairly straightforward presentation of the facts can come alive in the hands of an imaginative creator. “As a species, we are both visual and narrative learners,” says Wicks, who has a skeleton do a reverse striptease, donning muscles, organs, and skin, in Human Body Theater. “A relatively dry paragraph can come to life with the aid of comics, while comics can also achieve a silence (through absence of words) that is impossible to obtain in prose.”

“There are plenty of fine books of facts,” says Kevin McCloskey, author of the books We Dig Worms (2015), The Real Poop on Pigeons! (2016), and Something’s Fishy (2017, all Toon Books). “I enjoy seeing the funny side of things.” McCloskey’s works skip from topic to topic, presenting factual information about the subject interleaved with plenty of humor. He tunes in to what kids find appealing by listening to them—as he did during a trip to the Sea Life Aquarium in Orlando, FL. “Children clearly loved the place,” he says. “Toddlers screamed ‘Nemo!’ the moment they spotted a clown fish. In each room, I asked the attendants which fish kids liked best. That’s how I discovered the sea stars that look like chocolate chip cookies.”

The science behind the science

In this era of “fake news,” books that explore the rules and methods of science—and where they can go wrong—are particularly important. Darryl Cunningham’s How To Fake a Moon Landing: Exposing the Myths of Science Denial (Abrams, 2013) depicts the rise of homeopathy and vaccine denialism, and debates over evolution and climate change, concluding with a chapter on the scientific method itself. “We live in a time when critical thinking skills are more important than ever,” he says. “How is anyone going to be able to navigate the jungle of fake news and disinformation out there if they lack the skills to think critically? This is true even if the information you’re looking at conforms to your own biases. Just because you want to believe something doesn’t make it true. You should still research it anyway.”

In several of the stories, Cunningham points to strong personalities who helped promote or shape pseudoscientific movements. “It does always seem like there are one or two people leading these anti-science movements, and they push the agenda forward,” he says. “Would these movements be so effective without their leaders? Probably not, but they wouldn’t disappear altogether either. The Internet is rife with anti-science disinformation. People live in their own information bubbles, which are hard to penetrate with opposing views.”

Strong personalities also crop up in MK Reed and Joe Flood’s Science Comics: Dinosaurs (First Second, 2016), where the subject is not just dinosaurs but those who studied them throughout the years. Reed and Flood also stop the narrative at several points to list the facts that were known—and thought to be true—about dinosaurs at different times, which not only summarizes the research but also reminds readers that scientists are constantly revising their theories.

Interesting…but is it true?

These science books are fun—yet it’s still vitally important that they be accurate. “For each book, we have up to two consultants who work in the field that the book is covering,” says Roman. “With our upcoming polar bears book, for example, we have biologist Ian Stirling reading each draft of the script.”

In addition to her work at Toon Books, Mouly is the art editor of The New Yorker, which is known in publishing circles for its rigorous fact checking. Mouly has a fact checker look at McCloskey’s provided sources and additional sources to verify that the information is correct.

“Accuracy and clarity go hand in hand,” Mouly says. “Also, if we do a book on the subway or fish or the nitrogen cycle, we are kind of doing an essay on that topic. We want to cover the major outline of what’s interesting as well as quirky facts, so we need to do a body of research that goes with it.”

Sequential storytelling: the secret ingredient

Successful science graphic novels are far more than just the sum of their words and their pictures, Roman emphasizes. “Sequential art is really its own language, and there’s a magic about it that, for my money, is hard to match,” he says. “I always enjoyed textbooks or science magazines—like Zoobooks!—that had tons of illustrations or photos. But when you add in story elements and characters, that just takes things to another level and makes even abstract material all the more relatable.”

"Science Comic Plagues: The Microscopic Battlefield" by Falynn Koch

In the upcoming Science Comic Plagues: The Microscopic Battlefield (First Second, Aug. 2017) by Falynn Koch, he notes, “pathogens yellow fever and Yersinia pestis (bubonic plague) have real personalities that you can empathize with and are at times—gasp!—kind of cute. So if you are like me, after reading a comic about the human immune system, you never view getting sick the same way again.”