Boston, Book 9, and Birdley in Color

I will be going to a Zine convention in Boston this weekend to hear Marek Bennet, another teacher-cartoonist, speak about the use of cartoons in education. Other comic artists, including Colin Tenford and E.J. Barnes, are likely to appear at the convention. Should be a good time.

Between chasing my 3-year old around, book #9 is evolving. Its major include rocks, geologic time, volcanoes, and the role of microbes in shaping the biosphere. It's a lot to squeeze into 96 pages but Birdley will not disappoint. Source cartoons so far include the snottites from the Cueva de la Villa Luz in New Mexico, the three domains of life, intrusive & extrusive igneous rock, and fossil dating. For the latter cartoon I've been drawing some dinosaur fossils with my 3-year-old son, who has become increasingly involved with the Birdley business in recent weeks.

I've seen some cool Dr. Birdley "colorized" cartoons from students. It's always nice to see the characters in color, as I usually work in black and white since the comics need reproducibles. Although Birdley, Phyll, and Norman had their respective color schemes in place, it wasn't until I started doing the website that I had to seriously think about color schemes for Owelle, Clarissa, Lark, Don, and others. Incidentally, keep checking the http://www.birdleymedia.com/ site every so often for new characters and comics. They'll be coming soon.

Precambrian Time

I have here what some imagine to be a sprawling Precambrian landscape. My lessons this year on the precambrian were influenced by Lynn Margulis's lecture on geomicrobiology and symbiogenesis at Woods Hole this summer. Make no mistake, a lot of stuff happened in the first several billion years of earth's history. Birdley books 8 and 9 will have comics on this. In our class we talked a good deal about all the wild events that occurred during this time, as well as how our friends the cyanobacteria set up earth's atmosphere to support the diversity of life we see today by filling it with oxygen. Thanks to them our atmosphere is around 20% oxygen, enough to support the diversity of life we see today. What some people don't know was that at the time of the "Oxygen Revolution," the influx of oxygen into the atmosphere killed off a lot of the obligate anaerobes - microbial species that required oxygen-free environments. Some fortunate ones survived by finding oxygen-free habitats like thermal vents. Another thing I learned is that before the cyanos filled the atmosphere with oxygen they sent all the oxygen into the oceans. It reacted with dissolved iron in the sea to form rust, which became locked up in geological features called banded iron formations (BIFs). So you can see how microbes were starting to shape the earth and its geological features. I say if you have a chance to teach about the Precambrian, spend some time on it. A lot of stuff happened over those several billion years.