Margreet de Heer's Blog, page 11
March 5, 2014
My Secret Parallel Life
A long time ago, following in the footsteps of my parents, I chose to study theology, and I even graduated – so it’s only by a happy quirk of fate that I’m a comic artist now and not a minister in some faraway parish… Thank God!
Maybe somewhere, in a parallel universe, I DID become Reverend De Heer after all. I’m exploring the alternative life I could be leading in this comic I’m making for the Dutch Protestant Church Ministers Union Magazine:
(The “picturesque parish of Brokkenhoek” is a spoof...
February 23, 2014
Uncertainty’s Birthday
Today it is 87 years ago that German physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote a letter to fellow scientist Wolfgang Pauli describing his Uncertainty Principle – the principle in Quantum Theory that you can measure an electron’s position or its speed, but not at the same time: one of these, position or speed, will necessarily remain uncertain. In my book Science: a Discovery in Comics I included it like this:
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle has spawned many jokes in theoretic physicists – maybe you...
February 14, 2014
Valentine’s Day
It’s Valentine’s Day! I went through my archive and looked up a few comics I made over the years with a Valentine theme. These two appeared in H/Link, student magazine of the Haagse Hogeschool, in 2012 and 2013:
A year later, they were a couple:
January 24, 2014
LOVE
This week, Yiri and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. Every relationship has its own “creation myth”, so to speak; its own tale of How It All Began, to be told at dinner tables using all-encompassing gestures and eliciting “Aawww”s from the audience – here is ours:
January 12, 2014
Women in Science
Today it is exactly 99 years ago that theUnited States House of Representatives rejected an amendment to give women the right to vote. A representative of Ohio illuminated his position by explaining:“The women of this smart capital are beautiful. Their beauty is disturbing to business; their feet are beautiful; their ankles are beautiful, but here I must pause — for they are not interested in the state.”
The idea that women belong exclusively to the realm of beauty, bearing and raising childre...
January 6, 2014
The WiiU and me
For the holidays I got a Nintendo WiiU – that awesome game device you can use to play all kinds of entertainment directly on your TV screen, or, in this new version, on a beautiful touchscreen pad, which lets you enjoy features such as Art Academy, which is basically a digital drawing set of pencils and crayons.
Drawing on this device is remarkably easy. And the fun thing is I could immediately upload my pictures to the so-called MiiVerse, which is sort of like Facebook for Nintendo players. O...
December 30, 2013
December 21, 2013
Merry Christmas – have some Easter Eggs!
AnEaster eggis: “an intentionalinside joke,hidden message, or feature in a work such as acomputer program,movie,book, orcrossword.”I have hidden a few easter eggs in my books, and today, as we’re approaching Christmas, I’ll reveal some of them to you.
When you open Philosophy: a Discovery in Comics, the first thing you see is the endsheets (only in the US edition!). I have laid them out in a grid and filled them with pictures from the book:
But… wait a second! These are not ALL from the inside...
December 17, 2013
Philosophy and Science in Korea
In a few months, Philosophy: a Discovery in Comics and Science: a Discovery in Comics will be published in South Korea. I’m very thrilled about this! It’s really strange to see my work translated into a language I can’t read at all. I love the Korean letters, they look really mysterious and elegant:
The publisher is still deciding on what covers to use. Every culture is different, I’m learning more and more that what “works” for a Western market does not necessarily translate somewhere else. I...
December 9, 2013
Science: Happy Birthday, Ada Lovelace!
Today 198 years agoAda Lovelace was born – an exceptionally bright woman who became the first ever computer programmer. She led a short but interesting and in the end rather tragic life, which I’d like to commemorate with this comic:
This page is actually NOT from my book Science: a Discovery in Comics, but from a small booklet I made about seven famous friendships – of which that between Ada and Charles Babbage was an important one.
But Ada Lovelace IS mentioned in my Science book, in the chap...
