In Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, Vol. 1-7 (Doubleday 1990) – a trade-paperback collection of was originally a series of floppy-format comic books – there is a curious and abrupt change in drawing styles between Volume 6, “Who Are These Athenians?” and Volume 7, “All About Athens.” The latter is, by comparison to the former, a bunch of crude, amateurish scrawls. Why did this happen? Did Gonick suffer from a stroke or something and have to learn to draw all over again? Or maybe even learn to draw with his other hand? (In The Family Circus, when Bil “goes on vacation” and his son Billy “fills in” for him, I always assumed Billy’s childish doodling is just Bil drawing with his other hand.) I was collecting the comix before they ever came out on trade-paperback form, and at the time I recall wondering at the enormous lapse of time between the release of Vol. 6 and Vol. 7. Maybe illness or injury had something to do with that?
BTW: According to this – http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2003-08-20/feature.html/4/index.html – Gonick is planning to release the fourth and final volume of CHotU in 2006 or 2007. Say it ain’t so! I want at least three more volumes – 1492-1789; 1789-1914; 1914-present. Nothing less will do the topic justice! As Gonick himself noted on Vol. III, “Wow! Information density’s goin’ up!”
I’d also like to see him add to his science series with a Cartoon Guide to Chemistry – then he’ll have all the basic fields covered.
I wondered about that too–especially when there was a picture of Pericles in his “normal” style.
Here’s a ditto to a guide to chemistry. Math would be a cool subject to cover, too, but it might get a little scary once he starts getting into group theory.
Yet over the course of CHotU II and III, his drawing gradually improved, the point where it is now as good as it ever was – but still noticeably different.
The guy ain’t Pynchon or Salinger–he has a place on his front page where you can email him. I did and will let you know in the event he replies. And BG–I blamed you for everything, the rumor mongering, the invasion of his privacy, all of it.
As for him doing a book on Mathematics, the poor guy has only a masters in it. Is that a good enough base from which to write a book?
I checked out the thread (it’s good to have a thread!), and I can answer a number of questions:
The drawing style changed because I drew Vol 7 with a pen. Everything else in the series was drawn with a brush. The reason was complicated. I had fallen in love with the cartooning of the great Malaysian cartoonist “Lat” (if you haven’t seen his work, check it out; he’s fabulous), and a fellow-cartoonist here simultaneously made some snide remark like, “a brush just screams professional cartoonist.” So I decided to experiment with a pen. The experiment was 100% successful. No doubt about the outcome at all. Back to the brush.
The fourth book will not, in fact, be the last one. There will be five in all. CHU IV will go through the American Revolution. CHU V will start w/ the French Revolution and end with the present, whenever that is (or if it is).
As my spam-riddled blog reported, The Cartoon Guide to Chemistry is now finished. It will be out in the spring.
For those of you interested, this page (from a museum retrospective) has some information about Lat as well as some examples of his cartoons (including some very, very early stuff). I’ve always liked Lat and Kampung Boy is a classic–if you find a used copy, grab it.
Oh, yeah, I had heard about the pen/brush debacle.
Being myself a lifelong hard pencil/pen/marker user, remembering what my stuff looked like when I tried inking with brush (and don’t even mention direct-to-digital) made it obvious to me long ago that changing your medium/instrument can really throw your whole style for a loop.
Love these books. Best mass-audience review of general History I’ve laid my hands upon in ages (though I caught a pet-peeve annoying misconception being vectored in one of the “footnote” panels of Vol. 3 – namely the meaning of “Papal Infallibility” – I can forgive it because the whole is so good).
