Wow, all of a sudden I have a ton of great links to share, all about graphic non-fiction. And sometimes you find them in the darndest of places…
Last night I was hanging out in a pub on the MIT campus and happened upon Joost Bonsen, the creator of an interesting new book called Howtoons that aims to get kids excited about engineering. It has all sorts of projects for things that people can make at home with commonly found items. There is also a Howtoons website featuring lots more online.
Also there was Joost’s friend Drew, who pointed out to me that the latest edition of Nature features the graphic “Adventures in Synthetic Biology” teaching about DNA and engineering biology. It starts with some very basic concepts, and then ramps up to some very complex stuff (a pdf. is also downloadable from here). Very cool!
Finally, several months ago a student named Shane Smith had emailed me about an essay he was writing about “essay comics,” and, practicing what he preached, that’s exactly what he’s created! “Academaesthetics: How the essay and the comic can save each other” is a (long!) graphic essay arguing just what that title says (linked site leads to pdf). Definitely worth reading, especially for its comparative analysis of mine and McCloud’s definitions of “comics” and as a well executed use of the medium it’s advocating.
Go now!
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