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People may think of comics and science as worlds apart, but they have been cross-pollinating each other in more than ways than one.
Many classic comic book characters are inspired by biology such as Spider-Man, Ant-Man and Poison Ivy. And they can act as educational tools to gain some fun facts about the natural world.
Some superheroes have scientific careers alongside their alter egos. For example, Marvel’s The Unstoppable Wasp is a teenage scientist. And DC Comics’ super-villain Poison Ivy is a botanist who saved honey bees from colony collapse.
Superheroes have also crept into the world of taxonomy, with animals being named after famous comic book characters. These include a robber fly named after the Marvel character Deadpool (whose mask looks like the markings on the fly’s back) and a fish after Marvel hero Black Panther.
Portland creators are getting in on the boom.
By
Julia Silverman
12/13/2020 at 5:00am
Published in the December 2020 issue of
Portland Monthly
An hour before the panel of authors was set to take the stage, the line at the 2019 Portland Book Festival event was already at least 1,000 hard-core, book-clutching fans deep, most of them craning their necks and standing on tiptoe, trying to game out whether they were close enough to the front of the line to snag a spot inside the 376-seat Whitsell Auditorium in the Portland Art Museumâs basement.
Clearly, festival organizers had underestimated the intense enthusiasm for the featured authorsânot pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell or former United Nations ambassador Susan Rice, who were the festivalâs nominal headlinersâbut instead a group of middle-grade graphic novelists, among them one of the formatâs biggest rock stars, Bay Area author-illustrator Raina Telgemeier, whose 2010 debut memoir,