The E-CAM issue of Comics & Science has just been released on-line…and it’s just the beginning of the adventure!
Identifying exciting and original tools to engage the general public with advanced research is an intriguing and non-trivial challenge for the scientific community. E-CAM decided to try something unusual, and embarked on an interesting and slightly bizarre experience: collaborating with experts and artists to use comics to talk about HPC and simulation and modelling!
The adventure started when CECAM Deputy Director and E-CAM Work-Package leader Sara Bonella visited the CNR Institute for applied mathematics “Mauro Picone” (Cnr-Iac), in Rome, and became acquainted with the work of Comics&Science, a magazine published by CNR Edizioni to promote the relationship between science and entertainment. The magazine was created in 2013 by Roberto Natalini, Director of the Cnr-Iac, and Andrea Plazzi, author and editor with a scientific background and active in the field of comics.
Adopting the unique language of the comics, Comics&Science communicates science in a funny and understandable way via original stories that are always edited by some of the best authors and cartoonists in town. For the E-CAM issue, we had the good fortune to collaborate with Giovanni Eccher, comics writer and scriptwriter for movies and animations, and Sergio Ponchione, illustrator and cartoonist.
Giovanni and Sergio created for us the unique story of Ekham the wise, a magnificent witch that – with an accurate model and the help of a High Performance Cauldron (!) – enables Prince Variant to defeat the fearful Dragon that has kidnapped Princess Beauty. As usual, the King had promised the Princess’s hand to the vanquisher of the dragon, but things don’t turn out exactly as expected…
In addition to the comics, the E-CAM issue of Comics&Science presents several articles describing – in a language targeted at young adults, and, in general, lay public – what are simulations in advanced research and the role of High Performance Computing. The issue also contains a statement from the European Commission on its vision for HPC. We are very grateful to our authors, that include Ignacio Pagonabarraga, Catarina Mendonça, Sara Bonella, Christoph Dellago, and Gerhard Sutmann, for playing with us.
The issue has been produced in partnership with CECAM, coordinator of E-CAM, and the longest standing institution promoting fundamental research on advanced computational methods.
The E-CAM issue of Comics&Science is freely available on our website at https://www.e-cam2020.eu/e-cam-issue-of-comics-science/. Should you wish to use this new toy to promote modelling and simulation, get in touch at info@e-cam2020.eu and let us know about your plans: we are happy to share the material provided that provenance is acknowledged.
The “first outing” of the E-CAM issue of Comics&Science took place on Friday 30 October at 14:15 CET with a presentation (in Italian) in the on-line programme of the 2020 Lucca Comics&Games Festival. A recording of that moment is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUysRG0zlCk.
Enjoy the read and, most importantly, have fun 🙂
©2020 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
