By Darryl Cunningham

Myriad Editions

After the emotional, highly personal experiences contained within Psychiatric Tales, Darryl Cunningham turns his cartoonist’s eye to the world of science.

In the process he documents the struggles of rigorous scientific method to overcome the lies, hoaxes, and scams perpetuated upon us by the science deniers, the conspiracy theorists, big business, the deluded, the easily led, the scaremongering media, and the just plain wrong.

Cunningham gives a chapter each to electroconvulsive therapy, homeopathy, the MMR controversy, the moon hoax, climate change, evolution, chiropractic, and science denial, with his cartoon self acting as our guide, an ever-present narrator from the comic page, mixing art with manipulated photo reference, talking us through the science, debunking as he goes.

I’ve never had much time for the sorts of people Cunningham details in this book, never been one to suffer the anti-evolutionists, the believers in MMR as a cause of autism, the Climate Change nay-sayers, and all the rest of the Science deniers. So it’s good to see the arguments presented so well, clearly and concisely, with thankfully none of your artificial media balance, no giving the cranks and the frauds a voice, this is Cunningham doing the job I wish more would do.

But there’s a small trade-off involved. Cunningham’s summarising; concise, to the point, with all the simple and effective and rather beautifully done artwork we’ve come to expect can, on occasion, come off a little too lightweight.

This is most noticeable in the chapters dealing with the really big stuff. Given 20-ish pages, it’s relatively easy to effectively cover the Moon Hoax nonsense, or even Andrew Wakefield and the whole MMR farce that threatens to make Measles a disease to be feared once more. Far harder to cover something as vast, important, and often difficult to grasp, as evolution or climate change.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not saying Cunningham’s got it wrong. Far from it. What Cunningham does here is rather brilliantly presented, and customarily classy. As an artist his work is equally at home in the stark black and white of Psychiatric Tales or the lush and varied colours in Science Tales.

Science Tales does pretty much exactly what it needs to – a pop science response to the vagaries of the modern media, who’re either telling us that this thing or that thing gives/doesn’t give us cancer or being so even handed that they feel the need to bring a creationist to every evolution news story.

It also acts as a worthy addition to the chorus of those of us calling for scientific method to be championed as one of the greatest achievements of humanity thus far, and certainly the only real way to make any sort of judgement of our world and our place in it is a fine thing indeed.

Does it work? No, not completely. There’s an almost inevitable sense of Cunningham preaching to the converted here, there’s that sense occasionally of simple summarising taken almost too far, and it does lack some of the intensity of Psychiatric Tales, where Cunningham delivered real human emotion to the details, allowing us to view his subjects as people, rather than mere conditions.

But despite these small flaws, Science Tales is impressive, Cunningham delivering his message with style, great art, even moments of outright comedy. All in all, we have something else to deliver the message of science and reason, and that’s a good, good thing.

Unless of course, you’re the people who believe this rubbish that Cunningham debunks. In which case, you’ll probably just organise a mass burning of the book at your next Homeopathy meeting to help cure Gladys’ bowel cancer. Good luck with that. I’m going with team science.

Chatting and book launching Science Tales, with a bookplate available at Gosh on the night as an exclusive:

The good news is that we will be getting something called History Tales. Here are the first sightings:

History Tales by Darryl Cunningham. Coming from Blank Slate sometime. That’s about as definite as it gets right now.

Darryl Cunningham’s new book Science Tales, published by Myriad Editions, is having a launch event at Gosh London on 24th April.

The book looks, as you expect by now from Cunningham, bloody lovely. But this may well prove to be a touch controversial as well. Or at least controversial in certain places, as it features strips involved with all of those subjects that really do agitate the naysayers and the anti-science mob: Evolution, MMR, Moon Landings, Homeopathy …. that sort of thing.

Do yourself a favour, have a look over Cunningham’s work at his blog. There’s so much lovely work there, including a series of beta versions of the Science Tales strips. Here’s a couple pages from Evolution:

It’s Cunningham’s Dark Knight meets modern economic reality, a grim and gritty superhero vigilante nutjob  meeting the occupy movement… right now it’s very early in chapter one and I’m already intrigued as to where it’s going.

Here’s pages 1-3. Head to Act-I-Vate for more:

Darryl Cunningham, not content to have two books lined up for this year from two publishers (Science Tales from Myriad and Uncle Bob Adventures from Blank Slate Books, see Richard’s post here) also has his new online strip The Fist due to start soon on my favourite webcomic collective, Act-I-Vate. We’ve known for a while it was coming up but Darryl has now confirmed it will commence its run next week from Wednesday 22nd onwards on Act-I-Vate.

Science Tales by Darryl Cunningham (Myriad Editions April 2012)

First there’s the highly anticipated Science Tales, coming in April 2012 from Myriad Editions:

“…Cunningham turns his questioning mind and sharp intelligence to de-coding the myths and lies that have shaped some of the most fiercely-debated issues of the past fifty years. A graphic milestone of investigative reporting, Science Tales takes on controversies surrounding climate change, electro-convulsive therapy, the moon landing, the MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) vaccine, homeopathy, evolution, the tobacco industry and science denialism”

Expect this to be despised by a lot of people, and just for them, here’s the first page of the homeopathy chapter:

Then there’s two very different books coming from Blank Slate Books…

Uncle Bob Adventures – May 2012

Uncle Bob Adventures is Darryl’s all-ages book, and from the strips we’ve seen on his blog, it looks a real weird and wonderful one (provisional cover below) :

And finally from Daryl – The Fist, online at Act-i-vate sometime later in 2012.

(a couple of pages from the final chapter of Science Tales, Science Denial, by and (c) Darryl Cunningham, to be published by Myriad Editions)

I suppose some may say what is the point of tackling the varied types of people who decide on no evidence or through sheer stubborn ignorance to ignore provable scientifc fact in favour of whatever theological, spiritual or conspiracy-fed idea they prefer. They may be crazy but if that’s what they want to believe then leave them to it. Which is fine as far as it goes – of course we all have the right to hold our own beliefs and express them. But when we consider that sometimes those with the fingers-in-my-ears-I-can’t-hear-you-no-that’s-not-real-proof brigade get to exercise real power, sometimes individually (think of some politicians who take the Bible so literally they demand Creationism be taught with equal weight in schools, politicans who denied AIDS caused HIV so no need for medicine) or in a great tabloid-lead panicking mass (the MMR jabs leading supposedly to autism scare). These have real human costs not only in ignorance but in pain, suffering and even death.

So I applaud Darryl for standing up and putting the rational case and doing it in such an accessible, not to mention often fun, manner. Even though he knows that some of those same ignorant deniers will refuse to be convinced no matter what evidence is put in front of them and would rather hurl abuse at him for even daring to say what he does (another mark of the ignorant is not only holding unsupportable views, they tend to think no-one should be able to express anything contrary to their belief system), because he knows much as many of us will love this work some of those others will hurl abuse his way, simply because they are ignorant and threatened and too damned stupid to actually read and think their way out of that (reading, still the best defence against ignorance – it doesn’t make you a know-all, but it teaches you enough to know how much more there is to know). So kudos to you, mate -  it’s good work and much of it needs re-iterating in the face of often tabloid style lead media nonsense about science, and more importantly about scientific matters which can and do have a direct impact on the quality of human lives and our precious biosphere in which we all live.