Science Comics: Cats, as enjoyable as a kitten video, but educational too

Graphic novels are meant to be entertaining and are incapable of being educational. Granted readers might gleam something from the art and the book’s cultural relevance, but on the whole, it’s for fun. It’s OK if you have thought that. Education and entertainment sometimes don’t mix. That’s why the best teachers, the ones that you still remember from middle school managed to entertain you while they were teaching you. They lower your defenses and then –BAM, start the soft messaging of teaching you something. Science Comics: Cats is like that and for middle school readers and up who want to learn about animals that will leave you feline fine keep on reading.

Cats tells a story. It follows a cat narrator and manages to keep audiences smiling all the while teaching them aspects about our online favorite foible. Every graphic novel from Science Comics that I read constantly amazes me as to how the authors are able to tell a story that makes sense while actually educating ages 10 and up.

In Cats we meet Bean, a lazy feline who is being interviewed as he’s lounging around on a curved piece of cat furniture. He guides us through mankind’s interactions with cats and how they’ve adapted around us. Cats are cats, how can you create a story about that lazy creature that’s looking for the sunny spot on my floor? Yes, but cats are also those funny online videos, they’re the Servals in the Savannah, the snow leopards in the mountains and the creatures that have papillae on their tongues. Why does a cat’s tongue feel so much like sandpaper? It’s the papillae that on their tongues, it helps them scrape meat off of bones and allows them to clean themselves.

Come for the laughs and stay for the education. Do cats really play with one another when they wrestle or is it some scaled down grudge match? It really is based on skills that they’ve had to use when they were relegated to exclusively living outside. Pounce on other kittens; pounce on a mouse, there’s no difference really. Unless of course, the cat was raised in a family where they didn’t kill mice, then it’s quite different. Those cats can live side by side with rats, mice or other critters that might be considered prey in a different environment. It’s nature vs. nurture, all we is Randolph and Duke to place a wager on the cat’s evolution and we’ll party like it’s 1983.

As an adult and someone who really enjoys learning about things, I love this series of books from :01 First Second Books. As a dad, what I find surprising is that our 10 year-old really, and I mean, really enjoys them also. I have no idea, what, if anything he’s learning long-term from them, but he loves reading them.  I do ask him what he likes about them or what was the coolest thing that he learned in the book, however, I get a one word response back. It’s quickly followed by “when does the next release come out and what will it be about?”.

What will it be about? He is learning or at the bare minimum caring about the food that he’s putting into his brain. For further proof of this he has to do a project on the planet of his choosing. He chose Jupiter and is using Science Comics: Solar System as one of the sources that he’s getting his facts from.

Science Comics: Cats continues the home runs that this series is hitting. It’s great casual reading for ages 9 and up. The book is by Andy Hirsch, who also did Science Comics: Trees, in addition to other projects.

There are some affiliate links in this post, because, cats.