[Music, Page turning sounds]
My name is Aaron Gronstal, and I work for the Astrobiology program office at NASA.
Let's see, my background's in Geomicrobiology, I did kind of...
start with NASA as a scientist and then kind of developed into other things.
I've been drawing pretty much all my life. My mother is a visual artist.
She does a lot of work in inks and watercolors.
I was kind of just self-taught.
I did kind of joke that like I finished my my PhD in Geomicrobiology
and then went back to being a 14-year old in my pajamas drawing
[laughing] comics in my bedroom.
Comic books were definitely kind of one of my dreams growing up.
Astrobiology is the study of the origins of life on Earth,
and the potential for life elsewhere,
and that includes a wide range
of different disciplines and scientists and...
and different scientific questions and
the graphic histories were just a good way to kind of gather all of those
disciplines and those individuals together and present the content in a way
that was more accessible to the general public, I think.
Like, the idea is that you should be able to
to look at the page without any text,
and get a story out of it.
And you should be able to look at the text and get a story out of it,
and they're not necessarily, they're telling the same thing from different angles.
Sometimes without even realizing it, you're digesting
the same information in two different ways at the same time and,
it can be a really powerful teaching tool.
Once the script is all together I sit down and
and start the actual drawing, and I work in pencil and ink by hand.
A lot of people work purely digitally but I do, you know, pen on paper
up through the inking stage.
I work first in blue pencil and then pencil on top of that,
and then inking the pencils.
By doing a blue pencil you can kind of get
the sketchy outline of things to begin with.
Then, once you scan, adjust the contrast, and make those lines disappear so then
you can just pull out the ink work at the end.
And then that goes in the computer and all the coloring takes place there.
Once the layouts are complete, I get all the kind of digital files together,
and those go off to the printer, and then we start getting proofs from the printer,
and approving the actual final product.
It's been really nice to kind of do this and
have people appreciate it and enjoy being in it and
which is one one reason like we go and
get permissions from everybody. Like, I want the scientists to enjoy this.
I want them to look at this and go like, "Ahh" you know, "there I am as a cartoon!"
and that kind of thing and it's great that it's gone over so well with the science community.
One of my favorite things with it as an outreach tool has been
at the conferences where the scientists are present and I encourage people that
are picking him up like, you should go around and get
you know, Dave Deamer to sign and you should get [laughs]
I think especially for some of the young career people
they've said that that's been actually a really good way to like,
go up and approach a scientists whose work they know but they're kind of
afraid to like go up and
just you know talk to Vikki Meadows even though Vikki's wonderful,
and she's really easy to talk to but like going up with the
comic and saying hey can you sign, you know, your image
It's a talking point that doesn't necessarily
come up in scientific fields all that often. [laughs]
Issue seven, which was pre-biotic chemistry and the origin of life,
that was released at AbSciCon 2019 just this past June...
and I immediately started work on the next one.
We're thinking biosignatures...
and life detection.
The blue pencil on this is like, really messy, but once you get down to the ink...
like, you don't see any of the blue.
Sometimes I start with the base image and then do kind of tracing paper over it and get the layering that way.
Anthony Rapp came to AbSciCon 2019,
as a keynote speaker. Yeah, he was in Rent.
And, I grew up gay in small town in Iowa. Like, Rent was kind of a big thing.
It was great to meet him in person, shake his hand, and thank him for his work.
[Mike, off-camera] And what's that day like when you get that first printed copy,
and you're holding it in your hand, what's that like?
Terrifying! [laughs]
It's always hard because you get it,
I mean, I'm one of those people that when I create something and...
and I have the finished product, the first thing I see is the things that I wish I had done different.
Like, it takes months, sometimes longer, for me to kind of look back,
see it with fresh eyes and be like, "Oh... it actually worked." [Laughs]