From the drawing board: transmitting science from the authors' side

Abstract

While the comic strip of reality explodes since more than two decades in the comic strip market, it was limited for a long time to the testimony or reportage. If there have always been examples of scientific popularization, the will of a directly scientific approach mixing researcher and author is quite recent. Dedicated collections have been created with the aim of applying the scientific method to comic strip works, whether in the human sciences (La Découverte, Sociorama...) or, more rarely, in the hard sciences (Octopus, sometimes the Petite bédéthèque des savoirs). Since this creation, some authors produce particularly in this field, or even present themselves directly as specialized in the popularization of science. On their side, researchers adapt their work directly into comics, trying to apply the same academic rigor to their articles. Between graphic faciliation and research in comics, different profiles of authors of research in comics emerge. Based on a study of the available corpus and interviews with several authors (Héloïse Chochois, Pochep, Martin PM, Emannuelle Dufour and Pierre Nocérino), the article attempts to draw up a typology, the issues that underlie the different authors' profiles and to update their approaches and the way they set up this research in comics.