As your eyes ogle at the black-and-white fish drawings and scan the wondrous words about secret species and great gill explorers, your brain may start to wonder: What in the world is Gonzo Ichthyology: A Graphic Guide?
“I don’t know what to make of it either,” admits the book’s writer, Milton Love, the well-known UCSB marine biologist whose words are surrounded by the intricate illustrations of artist Jessca Eggers. “It’s so different than the normal ichthyology text, and yet it has a lot of scientific information at the same time. It’s this interesting crossover.”
The 268-page graphic-novel-esque creation is broken down by the “Table of Our Discontents” that indicates the sort of chapters — Anatomy, Reproduction, Evolution, etc. — you might expect in an academic treatise. But once turning the pages, you find such subtitles as “Two Girls for Every Boy,” “The Curse of Physoclistous Bladders,” and “Just in Case You Needed It, Here Is More Proof that Gaia Must Have Been Smoking the Ganj,” revealing passages both titillating and rather exhaustive on their subject matter, in ever-entertaining ways.
That makes Gonzo Ichthyology ideal for short reading sessions, say, while eating lunch, ignoring TV commercials, or waiting for your family to finally be ready to leave the house. But lovers of science, fish, little-known history, random information, or just cheeky prose might wind up stuck on these pages for hours, which is what it would take to digest just the drawings alone.
Love — who previously authored the slightly more textbook-y but still proudly eclectic Certainly More than You Wanted to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast — retired more than a decade ago but maintains a presence on campus, as his research funding continued. “I still have my lab, but there is nobody there except me now,” he laughed, noting that his visits are dwindling to about twice a week. “It looks like something after the zombie apocalypse, and there is only one zombie left. I’m looking for some brain to eat.”
This book came about because Love’s students — when he had more of them — were perusing the artist Jessica Eggers’s website, where she posts and sells merchandise that features her haunting fish drawings. Love wanted to send a shirt to another famous ichthyologist named Ted Pietsch, but needed to inquire with Eggers on the sizes.
“What I’ve always wanted to do is write a fish text in the form of a graphic novel,” Eggers told Love, to which he responded, “I must have been a saint in a previous life because I would love to do that so much.” That was about four years ago.
The process was very back-and-forth, as Eggers — who has a master’s in fisheries management — was living in South Africa and now is based in the Netherlands. Love would send his riffs on how fish see, which one goes deepest, and which one had the stupidest name, among other revelations, and she’d send back illustrations weeks later.
“That’s how we eventually worked into a rhythm,” he said. “But I almost never gave her any suggestion about what the art should be. She is a genius when it comes to art. She can work in so many styles. It’s like a cross between Aubrey Beardsley, the late Victorian artist, and MC Escher.”
They dabbled in the traditional publishing route, but Love ended up mostly funding the project himself. “Any clod can publish a book, and we’re the clods,” he said.
But Love loves the result. “My definition of art is someone who is trying to express themselves through words or music or the visual arts to other people,” he said. “That’s what this is. It’s her vision in visual art and my vision in words. It’s a work of art. That’s all I really ever care about — that it was true to ourselves.”
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You can buy copies of Gonzo Ichthyology: A Graphic Guide at Chaucer’s Books or Metro Comics in Santa Barbara. Or buy online directly from Love — who’ll even sign the book with a lipsticked kiss — at really-big-press.myshopify.com.
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