Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Recently, I was reading my soon-to-be-5 year old kid a kids’ encyclopedia on sea animals. The format of the book was to ask a question on each page and then proceed to answer it (along with photos). That format (ask and answer a specific question) is far more interesting to kids than the narration of tens of facts without any apparent why am I being told all this? The other thing the book had, which I didn’t pay much attention to, was a single panel comic drawing on almost every page to amuse the kid: stuff like a fish sleeping on a bed after switching off the light. It turns out that drawing comics as a way to teach science is an approach actually adopted by a guy named Jon Chad! One of his Science comics is titled Science Comics: Volcanoes: Fire and Life . So why does he take this approach ? “I think when a reader can link a fact (or, their memory of acquiring a fact) to some sort of immersive narrative moment, there's a relationship that forms that is stronger than i...

I am reading this book titled “What If?” by Randall Munroe. It’s a book on “serious, scientific answers” to “weird, hypothetical questions”. Munroe also writes a webcomic called xkcd that’s very popular among the kind of people who usually read the above mentioned book: geeks, science fans and engineers! (Personally, I believe anyone can learn from such informative yet entertaining books, but that’s a different topic…) Talking of his webcomic made me think of how comics require you to be able to write as well as to draw. Or does it? Let’s look at some popular comics over the ages to check the validity of that hypothesis (I know, I know: I am in that “What If?” frame of mind when I use words like “validity” and “hypothesis”!) Let’s evaluate in chronological order. The Asterix comics were done by a team: one guy wrote; the other drew. Awesome outcome, wasn’t it? Then there is the Tintin series: the same guy did everything. The drawings are good, the stories even better: ...