When the science meets art – a report from the creation of comics about Earthquakes and Geomagnetic field
- 1Institute of Geophysics of the CAS, v. v. i., Praha 4, Czechia (mates@ig.cas.cz)
- 2Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the CAS, v. v. i., Praha 4, Czechia
As science communicators we are confronted with little attention paid to the understanding of the Earth inner processes in the educational system of the Czech Republic. For that reason, we thought about ways how to explain basic principles of the Earth dynamics in accessible way to the school students and high school youth. We saw comics as an attractive way that would overcome the gap between knowledge and the need to entertain the young readers. We also thought that in the comics we should not be tell all everything with lot of explanatory text, but rather to try to provoke the reader to look for information and answers and hence to start the passion for science. So, we are trying to explain by graphics.
The presented experience covers the collaboration among three researches, graphic designer and writer in the process of creation of two short comic books about earthquake origin and inner structure of the Earth and origin of the Earth magnetic field.
We believe that such collaboration – to be effective – needs to be founded on several principles. The base of the comics, the storyboard, needs to be the result of discussions and collective effort of all participants. The artists need to be given creative freedom and the researchers should explain how the processes work inside the Earth rather than to try to push forward their views of artistic expression of them. Also, mainly the researches need to accept the equality of roles during the creative process. Last but not least the friendly atmosphere helps a lot.
The first comics “When the Earth Quakes” was created during second half of year 2019 and first months of year 2020 so the work was mostly based on personal meetings. The second comics is in production during diverse lockdowns and thus most of the communication is realized online. Therefore, different types of communication will be reflected based on our experience.
The comics “When the Earth Quakes” and related board game is published under the Creative Commons license: https://www.ig.cas.cz/en/outreach/comics-seismic-wave/
How to cite: Machek, M., Kučerová, K., Brož, P., Lukačovičová, L., and Píša, D.: When the science meets art – a report from the creation of comics about Earthquakes and Geomagnetic field, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-10853, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-10853, 2021.
