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

Jason Viola grew up in small farm town in Massachusetts where he spent idle hours drawing comic strips about birds and cats. While his father's affinity for woodworking and storytelling encouraged his creativity, his mother managed a menagerie of pets which spurred an interest in animals that continues today. Continuing to find inspiration from biology and through the lens of pop culture, he has written about manatees, amoebas, and flowers with a modern, satiric twist. He's also written essays and reviews on independent comics, putting special emphasis on work that is often overlooked. Jason went to college in Buffalo, NY, where he met his wife Rebecca. They both help organize a Boston-area comics convention called MICE, and enjoy hiking together through the Middlesex Fells.

Jason is the co-author of Science Comics: Polar Bears.

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!

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

Praise for Science Comics: The Digestive System:

"Magic School Bus graduates ready for a busy, heavy informational load will find this just the ticket. ...A fun and challenging introduction."―Kirkus

"Serious middle school ­voyagers who go with the densely informational flow will wind up not intellectually constipated but, like E, ­ultimately, flushed with ­wonder." ―School Library Journal, starred review


Praise for the Science Comics series:

"This series―written by a handful of authors―seems determined to offer a useful introduction to anything a curious grade-school student might wonder about. The insight behind these books is a powerful one. So much information about the world around us is actually better conveyed visually, through charts, illustrations, and sequential panels, than purely using words." ―New York Times

"Like having a Time Life Science Library in comic books. Which is awesome!" ―Popular Science