Physics for Cats
by Tom Gauld
Physics for Cats is the most recent collection of Tom Gauld’s comics. All of these were originally printed in New Scientist magazine, and basically all of them are about academia or scientific research. Gauld draws comics to about the same dimensions as classic newspaper cartoon strips, although he usually draws them as just one big panel, only sometimes splitting them up smaller.
Gauld’s humor tends to be gentle and absurd. We get jokes about competition among scientists, like a researcher who’s jealous that his rival’s failed experiment exploded more spectacularly than his own, or a lab that can’t do any research because they spent all their grant funding on really cool looking scifi door…
Physics for Cats
by Tom Gauld
Physics for Cats is the most recent collection of Tom Gauld’s comics. All of these were originally printed in New Scientist magazine, and basically all of them are about academia or scientific research. Gauld draws comics to about the same dimensions as classic newspaper cartoon strips, although he usually draws them as just one big panel, only sometimes splitting them up smaller.
Gauld’s humor tends to be gentle and absurd. We get jokes about competition among scientists, like a researcher who’s jealous that his rival’s failed experiment exploded more spectacularly than his own, or a lab that can’t do any research because they spent all their grant funding on really cool looking scifi doors. There are other jokes about failed research, the risk that you might devote years to studying something that turns out to be less impressive than you hoped, or to trying to accomplish a task that proves to be impossible. Gauld’s humor doesn’t mock so much as it commiserates.
We get comics where the humor comes from applying scientific language or attitudes to another context, like when a scientist details their method of study before revealing that yes, they do know what they want to order, or when we experimentally vary the length of Rapunzel’s hair and the height of her tower to observe the effect on the outcome of the fairy tale. There are also several comics where characters realize they’re in a drawing.
Because they were all originally published in one place, and had a consistent topic to fit that publication, the comics here have more thematic unity than you usually get from Gauld. He’s always had recurring subject matter - often about books, authors, and tropes of fiction - but this ends up being a more cohesive collection than previously.