A capacity crowd of students gathered for a talk titled “High Concept, Low Art: Cartoonists Larry Gonick and Randall Munroe in Conversation about Life, the Universe and Nothing” on Monday night in Taylor Auditorium in Frick Chemistry Laboratory. Due to the large crowd, two overflow rooms were set up in Jadwin Hall that streamed a simulcast of the lecture.
Gonick, most known for his series “The Cartoon History of the Universe,” specializes in cartoons that convey concepts from math and science. Munroe is the creator of “xkcd,” a popular webcomic.
Gonick spoke first, walking through a series of panels from a number of his books, ranging from a humorous explanation of the evolution of sexual reproduction to a pictorial explanation of the chain rule featured in a cartoon guide to calculus.
“I am a content purveyor,” he said. “I’m a nonfiction person ... I know it’s a low art, but I’m interested in big ideas.”
Later, he noted the risk of such an approach. “I live in fear of some academic looking at how our information is conveyed in comics discovering that it’s actually bad for you,” he explained.
Munroe followed, providing commentary for a number of his sketches. His presented work covered a wide breadth of topics, from a chart of characters’ geographical positions in “The Lord of the Rings” to a graph that charted “usable orifices” against “penis size.” He said that he felt that his audience thinks he knows more than he does.
“I get to pick and choose the little bits that I know something about and do a comic about those,” he explained. “People tend to read those and assume that I know all about their field.”
“If I make any kind of mistake, I will probably find out about it from the inventor of the field,” he added, relating a story in which software freedom activist Richard Stallman emailed him complaining about an inaccurate portrayal of him in a comic.
He also said he enjoyed watching his audience play with the ideas he presents, showing an online animation someone did of one of his comics.
“I’ll have an idea like this, and then people will take it and run with it,” he said.
In the question-and-answer session that followed, the artists discussed their influences and techniques. While discussing how to convey emotion in stick figures through the curvature of lines, Gonick spoke about the central question he faces as an artist. “It’s a question of how much you abstract and how much you leave in,” he explained.
Despite the crowd’s animated response to the speakers’ jokes and drawings, student responses were mixed.
“I enjoyed it thoroughly,” John McSpedon ’14 said. “It was interesting to get the perspective of someone who is syndicated, from that medium,” he said about Gonick.
However, Max Rubin ’14 noted that “xkcd” seemed to be the main draw for most attendees. “It was fun, it was interesting, but to me it seemed that most of the people were there to see Randall,” he explained. “I’ve never seen so many people in one place just looking at ‘xkcd.’ ”
Yet, he added, “I didn’t get a real feel for what the whole background purpose of this was.”
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