Spineless: The Newcastle Science Comic is our 16 page, 7-creator comics anthology created in partnership with Great North Museum: Hancock in Newcastle, as the childrens exhibition guide to their Spineless exhibition about invertebrates (minibeasts, bugs, beasties…) in summer 2015.
We’ve printed 20,000 newsprint copies of Spineless (and a full digital version: go to the Newcastle Science Comic blog and click the cover image on the right of the screen).
Each chapter of Spineless-the-comic supports a section of Spineless-the-exhibition, and was created as a collaboration between comics creators and the exhibition’s guest curators. Both the comic and the exhibition are free.
We’ve published Spineless with a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. This means you can share the comic (physical and digital versions) with others as long as you credit our project, but you can’t change the comic in any way or use it commercially. We hope this will make it easy for children, adults, teachers and other professionals to read and share Spineless – and, of course, ensure that the science research and natural history can be credited back to GNM: Hancock’s guest curators!
The exhibition ran from 1st August- 1st November 2015. Spineless was our second Newcastle Science Comic title, following Asteroid Belter which was created as part of the 2013 British Science Festival (and still available to read free on our Newcastle Science Comic blog).
Here are our top team of Spineless contributors and the minibeast habitats in their comics:
- Jess Bradley introduces us to invertebrates
- Terry Wiley, with guest curator Irene Brown, explores coral reefs
- Emily Rose Lambert, with guest curator Dan Skerritt, has fun at the seaside and underwater
- Samuel C Williams, with guest curators Vivek Nityananda and Erica McAllister, goes to the rainforests
- Sigmund Reimann, with guest curator Fiona Ware, drops into caves
- John Gatehouse and Dave Windett, with the Environmental Records Centre North East, adventure into the back garden
Academic publication based on this project:
- Wysocki L. (2018) Farting Jellyfish and Synergistic Opportunities: The Story and Evaluation of Newcastle Science Comic. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8(1), 6. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.119
Science FACT-ion used the medium of comics to show 8-13 year olds how science fact and science fiction are both separate and interrelated, then check this understanding. We also challenged readers to design their own inventions, with the winning drawings published in Asteroid Belter and exhibited at Newcastle City Library.
