The Cartoon History of the Universe

100 Comics #5

Part of the reason for writing these posts about comics from my personal library is to get mentally prepared for the Comics Sans Frontières conference at Rice University in March. The man behind that conference, cartoonist/professor Christopher Sperandio, has been working a lot on comics as a pedagogical tool. I think many comics fans—myself included—consider educational comics in general to be pretty bad. They often feel annoyingly earnest, and they talk down to their intended audience. I imagine some well-meaning public health department wanting to communicate to the public about some health practice; they think, what kind of educational material would be accessible to the most uneducated people? Comics!

That seems to have been the thinking of the U.S. Army when they published PS: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly, a comic to explain to soldiers how to take care of their equipment. Even though PS was edited by one of the greatest cartoonists ever, Will Eisner, as well as employing many other talented comics artists, no one is eager to go back and read PS (except maybe Will Eisner completists). A similar motivation was behind Classic Illustrated, which provided the slower children of America with drastically simplified versions of literary classics. It is a type of comic that is hard to love.

Today I want to look at my favorite “educational comic”—The Cartoon History of the Universe by Larry Gonick. Gonick is a former mathematician who started producing a political comic strip in Boston in the early 70s for the Boston Phoenix, one of the earliest alternative newsweeklies. After that he did a comic strip about Boston history for the Boston Globe. I assume that Bicentennial cartooning gig got him interested in using comics to talk about history, because a couple of years later the first issue of The Cartoon History of the Universe was published. It was a thick comic book published by one of the surviving underground comics publishers, Rip Off Press.

Most publishers of educational comics specialize in an educational mission, but Rip Off was a general-interest publisher who were best known for comics about smoking marijuana—comics like the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. I have always been curious what brought Gonick and Rip Off together. Gonick came from the world of underground newspapers, with which Rip Off was involved with through a syndication deal. And Gonick’s style was never going to fly with a publisher like Gilberton, which published Classics Illustrated. Gonick wasn’t a taboo-busting underground cartoonist, but if ancient people were naked, he was going to draw them naked. In short, his history comics weren’t aimed at kids.