Thursday, July 16, 2026

Physics for Cats by Tom Gauld

Tom Gauld is one of our funniest cartoonists, and also comes off as one of our most erudite. He cartoons regularly both for The Guardian, about books and the literary world (most recently collected in Revenge of the Librarians) and for New Scientist, about, well, science and scientists.

The previous book of New Scientist cartoons was Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, about five years ago. Last fall saw a new one appear: that's Physics for Cats.

Like all of the books reprinting Gauld's series comics, it's in a smallish format, with each cartoon presented in color on one page. His work tends to be about the size of two daily comics stacked on top of each other - sometimes laid out as a single panel, sometimes in a sequence, sometimes in a more complex pattern - which means that page-size presents the work well. And the resulting package could sit nicely in a cardboard display next to the cash-wrap, for those who actually still shop in physical bookstores. (I did, and got this book in one, but it wasn't displayed that way. My frame of reference may still be, anachronistically, a mall chain bookstore from the mid-80s.)

Gauld's art is cartoony in a minimalist way - his people sometimes have faces (well, at least eyes) but, in the middle distance, they tend to turn into silhouettes. That also makes his style well-suited for icons and warning labels, of which we see quite a few in this book (Frost Giants, Haunted Tornado, Sentient Nano-Smog).

The cartoons here are all on scientific themes - particles and theories, labs and colleagues, grants and grant-seeking, academic conferences and meetings, and so on. They will be funnier the more you know about science in general, but they're not deeply hermetic: they're all for a general-science audience, not for any particular sub-specialty like forensic avian biology.

I've written about Gauld's work a number of times before, and am running out of adjectives and ways to praise his cartoons. Look: he makes funny work for smart people, OK? If you consider yourself a smart person, and haven't checked out Gauld yet, you really should.

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