The Seeing Eye of Scientific Graphic Biography

Abstract

Several recent graphic biographies tell the stories of the early days of nuclear research, from the discovery of radioactivity in the 1890s to the United States atomic bomb testings of the 1950s. 1 Some are both celebratory and complex, such as Jim Ottaviani and Lelan Myrick's colorful Feynman (2011), a full biography of the larger-than-life American theoretical physicist, educator, and writer Richard Feynman. Ottaviani and Myrick use his famous Feynman Diagrams, which look like squiggly line drawings, as a motif throughout the book so that science meets art to depict the life of a man who thinks in pictures. In a quite different mode, Lauren Redniss's Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (2010) is a double biography of the private and professional lives of this famous pair of chemists. Redniss incorporates cartoons, drawings, photographs, diagrams, and words into a visual-verbal collage of the discovery of radium. She also extends beyond the Curies' lifespans to depict how their discovery of radioactivity eventually led to theories of the nuclear atom, the development of the atomic bomb, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Nuclear history personalized through the lives of scientists is also the theme of two graphic biographies that focus on Robert Oppenheimer: Jim Ottaviani's collaboration with seven illustrators in Fallout:

Comparison of Graphic and Textual Biographies in Slovenian Literature

“…However, graphic biographies that were not autobiographies, apart from individual books, were rarely studied as a genre (Gorman 2007). Since 2008, however, Candida Rifkind has been systematically analysing them and is undoubtedly the leading scholar in the field of graphic biographies (Rifkind 2008(Rifkind , 2015(Rifkind , 2016(Rifkind , 2017(Rifkind , 2020. Rifkind also developed research methods for studying graphic biography (2019).…”

“…In 2005, Rifkind compared two graphic biographies about Robert Oppenheimer which used "visual strategies to overcome some of the narrative problems of prose scientific biography" (Rifkind 2005: 7). She argued that scientific graphic biography should be considered as a specific genre that installs a biographical eye as opposed to the "auto/biographical I" to explore the complex relationship between empirical knowledge and affective experience that shapes lives caught between science and politics (Rifkind 2015).…”