Science Comics: The Digestive System: A Tour Through Your Guts - Softcover

Viola, Jason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250204046 ISBN 13: 9781250204042

Publisher: First Second, 2021

Synopsis

In Science Comics: The Digestive System, visit the inside of your mouth, stomach, liver, intestines, and other organs that make up the gastrointestinal tract!

Your guide to the gut is a friendly bacterium who will take you on a journey beyond imagination. Uncover how food is transformed into nutrients! Explore strange and dangerous glands! Behold the wonders of saliva, mucus, and vomit! Writer Jason Viola and illustrator Andy Ristaino provide a trip to the toilet you will never forget!

Every volume of Science Comics offers a complete introduction to a particular topic―dinosaurs, the solar system, volcanoes, bats, robots, and more! Whether you're a fourth grader doing a natural science unit at school or a thirty-year-old with a secret passion for airplanes, these graphic novels are for you!

About this title

About the Authors

Jason Viola lives in Massachusetts, where he co-founded the Boston Comic Arts Foundation and helps produce comics festivals throughout the region. He is also the author of Science Comics: Elephants, Science Comics: The Digestive System, and Science Comics: Polar Bears. Jason lives outside Boston with his wife and son.

Andy Ristaino is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. He has worked as a designer and story boarder on Adventure Time for Cartoon Network and in his spare time likes to draw all sorts of creatures and aliens. He's had several trade paperbacks published including Night of the Living Vidiots, Escape from Dullsville, and The Babysitter!

Reviews

Gr 5–8—Greeting young "gastronauts" riding in on a lump of mashed potatoes, E, a genial microbe, conducts a detailed tour of the digestive system's anatomical and chemical wonders from the "booming microbial metropolis" of the mouth down to the rectal sphincters. Whether explaining what triglycerides, the uvula, or the liver do or nattering on about the causes and mechanisms of vomiting, flatulence, and constipation, E makes a coherent and informative guide…despite turning out to belong to the not-always-so-benign Escherichia coli clan. Ristaino's cartoon-style mix of fanciful and realistically detailed images offer informative inside views of individual cells, molecules, taste buds, and other tiny locales to go along with all the digestive organs, broad tunnels, and other macrostructures. He also packages fluids like saliva and feces in recognizably shaped squeeze bottles (readers will never look at ketchup the same way again) and by putting faces on the diverse populations of bacteria and archaea that add over four pounds to our weight and outnumber our own cells underscores the fact that we are not individuals but communities. Human figures in rare glimpses of the outside world show some variation in skin color. Like our bodies, this fantastic voyage also has an appendix—with schematic views of the digestive systems of six common animals from cats to cockroaches added on. VERDICT Serious middle school voyagers who go with the densely informational flow will wind up not intellectually constipated but, like E, ultimately, flushed with wonder.—John Peters, Children's Literature Consultant, NY

Edition details

• Publisher: First Second
• Publication date: 2021
• ISBN 10: 1250204046
• ISBN 13: 9781250204042
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 128
• Illustrator: Ristaino Andy