New York Times
A page from Hossler's comic book
"Your species would make an excellent slave for our dung mines!" says Kor-Go, the giant purple space beetle. "Come out and fight us, fragile creatures like you. Whoever survives will decide the fate of this planet."
This could have been a scene from a Tolkien movie, but it is a scene from a new comic book depicting the story of evolution. The book was written by Jay Hosler, a professor of biology at Huntingdon University in Pennsylvania.
15 years ago the US Supreme Court decided to ban the teaching of the scientific theory of creation in schools. However, this does not prevent the principals of the various schools from finding creative ways to sneak the subject into the classrooms. In August of this year, for example, a school in the USA voted in favor of teaching evolution together with the biblical alternative, as two equivalent options.
"The design of intelligence is intentional creation," says Hosler, "they took a vulgar word and made it sound scientific." In his comic book series "Sandwalking Adventures", which was published last year, Darwin is a superhero, the theory of evolution is his secret weapon (although it is difficult to draw it) and Mara - a small, talking creature that lives on his eyebrow - is his ignorant apprentice, determined to understand his ideas .
In March, the entire Hosler comic series will appear in one edition. Hosler unfolds the story of Mara's conversion from faith to theological explanations to support the theory of evolution, and at the same time manages to incorporate details from Darwin's life into his story.
Hossler's scholarly punctuality is not the only reason for the commercial success of the comic, which Hossler says reaches 1,400 copies per issue. Hoessler, an expert in neurobiology, won the prize for a comic story describing the biography of a giant bee. Hossler called this story an "educational comic".
So that the readers do not get confused between facts and imagination, Hosler added clarifying explanations in the body of the booklet, such as: "Hair follicles do not have eyes, and they do not speak either, I just wanted to make this clear."
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