Kristin Hussey Tales from the Chronobiology Lab is a new comic inspired by the science of circadian rhythms. The story follows Amy, a chronobiologist, as she tells us more about the body clock, what it is, why it matters, and how it is studied in the laboratory. The reader is taken on a time travelling adventure through the history of science and the present day lab to understand more about the questions which drive chronobiologists. We are so proud of the final outcome – a comic which is beautiful, grounded in storytelling, and grapples with scientific complexity. You can read it for free HERE. But the lovely finished product doesn’t tell the reader very much about the process of making it. So for this blog, I wanted to dive more into what it looks like to create a comic book across disciplines.
Let’s go back – way back – to the winter of 2021. Sofie and I are sitting down with a group of chronobiologists from CBMR to discuss visual communication of chronobiology. We have a look at the kinds of images that come up when you google search circadian rhythms. And we agree that while they might communicate what circadian rhythms are at a basic level – they aren’t that interesting. What if we worked together with Sofie to make something new I asked. Should we make a series of illustrations to replace these ones here? Or what if we did something more ambitious – what if we wrote a whole visual story about chronobiology? Everyone agreed this would be a fun thing to try, and off we go.
What followed was a collaborative process that took almost three years to complete. We worked together with scientists to decide what were the key concepts about chronobiology that are hard to explain to the public (or to other scientists!). We looked at what illustrations exist and how to do it differently. We pondered what kinds of stories and metaphors could be used to tie it altogether. Sofie followed scientists as they did experiments behind the scenes in the labs. And we researched, fact checked, and checked again. Not everyone always agreed about the best way to move forward or the best way to communicate the scientific concepts. We had to ask ourselves big questions like – should our comic have a public health message? What kind of impression does the comic give of the professionalism of scientists? Is it ok to be funny? Should we show a generalized research process or a specific experiment?
Ultimately this process was guided by my collaboration with Sofie – and together we worked to translate the input from the scientists into a story that we thought was clear, compelling and entertaining. It involved making tough choices and having to walk a difficult line between our narrative and the kind of scientific detail we wanted to include. I think all the collaborators shared the goal of wanting to make that didn’t feel like an educational textbook. We wanted to make an entertaining but also factual science comic for adult readers that said as much about what it is to do science and be a scientist as it did about chronobiology. I’ll always remember one of the scientists saying to me – I didn’t really know what it would look like to do scientific work day to day when I was younger, even when I was at university. It’s not something you see depicted very often.
We did try and also make some specific illustrations of circadian concepts that might be more useful than the google ones. So for example, from this rendition of the body around the clock:
To this one – an imagined board game where the player moves around the twenty-four hours and is influenced by the ‘zeitgebers’ of light, activity and food. We had a great time discussing with the scientists how a game based on the body clock would look and how it would work to play it.
I myself am a historian of science so I was very keen to try and incorporate into the story something about how ideas about circadian rhythms have developed over time. Who was thinking about the body clock in different periods and how does the research connect together? It is very hard to represent this complex process visually – but I really enjoyed the idea of these key scientific figures like Nathaniel Kleitman, Jean-Jacques de Mairan and Charles Darwin all coming together to have a chat about chronobiology today.
Conceptually our approach was strongly influenced by Science and Technology Studies (STS). STS is a field that is interested in how scientific knowledge is made and sees science as being a part of society. Inspired by STS, we set our sights on following science ‘in practice’ – asking how it is made, by whom, and why? We found that this ‘practice’ based angle helped us move beyond just broad concepts and find out something more about what actually happens in the lab – hence the name of the comic. This framework also emphasizes that science isn’t something secret or special or incomprehensible by most of us – it’s just another part of our world that maybe some of us don’t get to see very often. Storytelling can peel back some of the perceived barriers between everyday life and scientific work. And then it was down to mainly Sofie (with some input from me) to turn all of these ideas and insights into a comic with interesting characters and narrative structure, motifs, colour palettes, textures, and more.
There are so many more stories I could share from the process of making the comic. And without taking away too much of the experience of just reading it, it’s important to remember that every word, every small detail, is something that was carefully planned and considered by the authors and collaborators. We hope it all has come together into something that is interesting and fun to read – maybe you’ll want to learn more about circadian rhythms, or maybe not. Maybe you might want to become a scientist yourself. But whatever your experience, we just hope you enjoy the comic!
With thanks to Sofie Louise Dam, our scientific collaborators, Medical Museion, and the NFF Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR) for making this project possible.
You can read the comic for free here: https://cbmr.ku.dk/outreach/chronobiology/
