By Dan Brown

I’m a fan of Tom Gauld’s work, so I was already inclined to like his latest collection, Physics for Cats: Science Cartoons, which was published in October.

It’s as strong as such previous books as his Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, Baking with Kafka, and Mooncop.

The cartoons collected in his latest publication originally appeared in New Scientist magazine. They continue his tradition of absurdist humour and once again, he covers the gamut from slapstick comedy to highbrow references (H.P. Lovecraft has been a recurring source of laughs for many years).

If the idea of a fun-sized Hadron Collider you can take to the beach strikes you as funny, then Gauld is the cartoonist for you. The closest comparison I can come up with is Gary Larson, who used to do The Far Side. Gauld has the same sort of cock-eyed way of looking at the world.

The toons here feature a cast of cat scientists, human scientists, cockroach scientists, alien scientists, medieval scientists, and talking dogs.

You don’t have to be a scientist to appreciate them, in fact a number of them revolve around petty office politics – apparently the science community is no different from any other made up of human beings. In fact, Gauld hints that the only thing separating modern scientists from old-school witches is their lab coats.

Do real scientists actually take the extra bones from museum exhibits and create super-scary monster skeletons out of them? I don’t know, but Gauld’s men and women of science do. 

Or imagine a job interview at the Institute for Lifespan Extension Research. Of course the applicant is asked, “Where do you see yourself in 500 years?”

There’s a fair bit of play with panels here as Gauld tries to stretch his usual platform of a single rectangular box. One panel in Physics for Cats can be read upside-down, another front to back. Yet another panel is phasing out of existence. And in one cartoon, the framing looks something like a traditional Sunday newspaper strip.

In one three-part cartoon, a scientist looks at a floating black disc. “I stared into the abyss,” she begins. “The abyss stared back.”

The punchline comes in the third panel: “One thing led to another, and now I meet the abyss for regular chats in the coffee shop near my lab.”

Gauld has clearly mastered the cartoon form by now. I would still love to see him experiment more with long-form narratives, as he did with 2016’s Mooncop.

That said, if you have an egghead on your Christmas list, or even just someone who’s really well-read, you could do a lot worse than Physics for Cats.

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.