November, 2009
Meet the man behind the comic
A passionate teacher creates a world of cartoon bunnies to help explain science.
Once upon a time, there lived a teacher whose mission in life was to make his students fall in love with science. Sir Fong, for that was his name, tried many methods. He cajoled, he threatened, he bribed and he pleaded, but all to no avail. His students, it seemed, just didn’t want to have anything to do with atoms and molecules, gravity or pressure. Sir Fong was desperate. What was he to do? And that was when it struck him – the answer was so obvious – make a comic book, for what in this whole wide world could be better than a good comic?
And so was born “Sir Fong’s Adventures in Science”. .
Packed with action-filled graphics featuring Sir Fong and his student bunnies, the books take you on a wild ride through the mysteries of science. In Book 1: Models, Atoms, Molecules, Elements and Compounds, you can travel back to ancient Greece to see how the idea of the atom first came about, shrink down in size to explore the microscopic world of protons, neutrons and electrons, and discover how each of us ended up with a little bit of dinosaur poo inside us!
The brain behind the series is Otto Fong, an engineer, playwright, teacher and now comic book author and illustrator. The bunnies featured in his comics are a tribute to his old students at Raffles Institution who were born in the Year of the Rabbit.
Making science fun
Mr Fong’s aim was to put the fun back into science. He remembered how, when he was a student, it was science-fiction stories like Star Wars that kept him interested in the subject. He realised that if a subject didn’t entertain a student, it would always be looked at as just an exam topic – to be learned and then quickly forgotten after the tests.
The dedicated teacher wanted to change that attitude. He wanted students not just to study but to understand and apply what they had learned. He found comics to be the perfect method because they could communicate a lot with simple and interesting drawings and very little text.
This technique obviously worked because his books have been getting a lot of praise. The author tells us how someone who had bought one of his books came back the next day to buy more copies to distribute to her friend’s children, because her own son had found the book so interesting.
Mr Fong also had some tips for What’s Up readers who might be interested in drawing comic strips of their own. “Copy your favourite artists like mad. And, after you copy enough, create something that is your own,” he says. “Coming up with something original is really not that difficult, because that something is already inside your heart. All you have to do is listen to yourself and not to let the rest of the world confuse or distract you. It’s like a flower blooming – all the best things about the flower are all contained within the flower itself. You just have to allow it to bloom.”
He also advises students not to neglect their other subjects. “If you know only how to draw and nothing else, then you are just a technician. You won’t be able to come up with your own stories.”
Once upon a time, there lived a teacher whose mission in life was to make his students fall in love with science. Sir Fong, for that was his name, tried many methods. He cajoled, he threatened, he bribed and he pleaded, but all to no avail. His students, it seemed, just didn’t want to have anything to do with atoms and molecules, gravity or pressure. Sir Fong was desperate. What was he to do? And that was when it struck him – the answer was so obvious – make a comic book, for what in this whole wide world could be better than a good comic?
And so was born “Sir Fong’s Adventures in Science”. .
Packed with action-filled graphics featuring Sir Fong and his student bunnies, the books take you on a wild ride through the mysteries of science. In Book 1: Models, Atoms, Molecules, Elements and Compounds, you can travel back to ancient Greece to see how the idea of the atom first came about, shrink down in size to explore the microscopic world of protons, neutrons and electrons, and discover how each of us ended up with a little bit of dinosaur poo inside us!
The brain behind the series is Otto Fong, an engineer, playwright, teacher and now comic book author and illustrator. The bunnies featured in his comics are a tribute to his old students at Raffles Institution who were born in the Year of the Rabbit.
Making science fun
Mr Fong’s aim was to put the fun back into science. He remembered how, when he was a student, it was science-fiction stories like Star Wars that kept him interested in the subject. He realised that if a subject didn’t entertain a student, it would always be looked at as just an exam topic – to be learned and then quickly forgotten after the tests.
The dedicated teacher wanted to change that attitude. He wanted students not just to study but to understand and apply what they had learned. He found comics to be the perfect method because they could communicate a lot with simple and interesting drawings and very little text.
This technique obviously worked because his books have been getting a lot of praise. The author tells us how someone who had bought one of his books came back the next day to buy more copies to distribute to her friend’s children, because her own son had found the book so interesting.
Mr Fong also had some tips for What’s Up readers who might be interested in drawing comic strips of their own. “Copy your favourite artists like mad. And, after you copy enough, create something that is your own,” he says. “Coming up with something original is really not that difficult, because that something is already inside your heart. All you have to do is listen to yourself and not to let the rest of the world confuse or distract you. It’s like a flower blooming – all the best things about the flower are all contained within the flower itself. You just have to allow it to bloom.”
He also advises students not to neglect their other subjects. “If you know only how to draw and nothing else, then you are just a technician. You won’t be able to come up with your own stories.”
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