Larry Gonick
Cartoonist, Author
Graduation Year:
1995
Bio:
A product of the public schools in Phoenix, Arizona, Gonick received a BA summa cum laude (1967) and MA (1969) in math from Harvard. His PhD thesis on partial differential equations was well underway when the upheavals of the late 1960s and early ’70s propelled him out of grad school and into political cartoning. His first regular feature was Boston Comix, a weekly strip in Boston After Dark and The Boston Phoenix, followed by a Sunday half-page, Yankee Almanack, a history of colonial Massachusetts and the American Revolution, appearing in the Boston Globe Sunday comics section.
Since then, he has written or coauthored 16 books and created several comic strips.
The first installment of his world-history series, The Cartoon History of the Universe, appeared in 1978 as a 48-page comic book, “The Evolution of Everything,” which by 2009 had expanded into a five-book, 1450-page graphic history of the world from the Big Bang to the first Iraq War. Book III, on the rise of Islam, the Byzantine Empire, and medieval Asia, garnered the comics industry’s highest honor, the Harvey Award for best original graphic album of 2003.
In the early 1980s, Gonick turned to scientific subjects. The Cartoon Guide to Genetics, coauthored with Mark Wheelis, demonstrated the power of sequential graphics to explain molecular biology. Since then, he has collaborated with numerous scientists on Cartoon Guides to a variety of subjects. These books have found wide acceptance in academia as supplementary textbooks and sometimes as primary reading in many settings, from a genetics course for nonspecialists at Harvard to the middle-school curriculum in the Chicago public schools. More recently, Gonick returned to mathematics with The Cartoon Guide to Calculus (2012) and The Cartoon Guide to Algebra (2015). His latest book, Hypercapitalism (coathored by Tim Kasser), is a return to his political roots.
Besides the Harvey Award, Gonick also received an Eisner Award from the San Diego Comicon and has been a featured speaker at numerous educational and scientific conferences.
His comic strips include Science Classics, a 2-page bimonthly feature in Discover Magazine, and Kokopelli and Company, a strip for younger readers in Muse Magazine. His History of the Telescope is the only comic strip ever to appear in the journal Science.
Location:
San Francisco, California, United States