Page 45 Review by Jonathan
"Sometimes we tend to treat our body as simply a shell, a temporary house for our mind...
"... but the truth is that our body is much more than that: it shapes the way we think."
The co-creator of NEUROCOMIC returns, this time with an assault on our senses. Or is that the other way around... as we learn all about our five primary senses: touch, taste, smell, hearing and vision from the inside out. Yes, once again Dr. Farinella goes all Fantastic Voyage on us, shrinking down our protagonist, a mildly mad scientist, to miniature size through a virtual reality experiment gone awry.
As before we get both a science and a history lesson as various renowned scientists of yesteryear spontaneously pop up to explain all about their discoveries and just how clever they are. As tour guides go, they certainly know their stuff! But as with the brain in his previous work, Dr. Farinella also takes the opportunity to point out there is an enormous amount we still don't really know about how we make... errr... sense of the huge amount of sensory input we are continuously receiving. In fact, the sensory data we process has an enormous influence on how we actually think, which is very neatly presented here.
In terms of explaining relatively complex concepts to us laypeople, I find Matteo Farinella's entertaining artistic approach as wonderfully clear and concise as Darryl Cunningham's GRAPHIC SCIENCE. It's exactly the sort of approach that will leave you wanting to know much more about precisely how our noggins deal with our unique human perception of reality. We just need the scientists to get on with their research!
Yet again, comics like this, plus Darryl's excellent works and also the Cannon Brothers' EVOLUTION: THE STORY OF LIFE ON EARTH and THE STUFF OF LIFE: A GRAPHIC GUIDE TO GENETICS AND DNA plus Adam and Lisa Murphy's CORPSE TALK: GROUND-BREAKING SCIENTISTS make you realise there really could be a much better way to educate and inform kids about what could otherwise be such very, very dry material to young minds.
A final mention for the cover, which with Nobrow's typically glorious production values, all shiny gold and silver printing on beautiful red cloth, has got to be a contender for the most dazzling cover of the year. It's a visual delight and highly satisfying to the touch, which I guess, is entirely appropriate for this work. Gently rubbing it against the ear also produced a mildly satisfying buzzing sound and I have always loved the smell of printed paper. I can't say it tasted particularly nice, though.
