Cover Contest - 3/14/18 to 3/20/18 SCIENCE! A Stephen Hawking memorial

[CaptCleghorn]

The theme this week is science! Please to post of a cover which is showing some form of science. Ideally, this would be accurate science, but these are comic books. If you feel the need to explain how your cover fits the theme, that would be welcome.

Today is Pi day in the USA, 3/14, noting the number Pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Today is also the day Professor Stephen Hawking passed away. Science seems to be a fitting topic.



THE RULES:
1) Post One (& ONLY ONE) Cover that fits the theme of this Week's Contest!
2) Cover must be from a Published Comic Book or Collected Volume!
3) Covers must be Posted before Voting Begins!
4) Voting Begins 12 AM Tuesday and Runs Until 12 AM Wednesday PST (3 AM EST)!
5) Vote by Posting the name in BOLD of the Poster whose cover best fits the theme or that you simply like the most! A vote need not be in bold, but it does make it easier to Count-The-Votes!
6) The Winner of the Contest is the Entry with the MOST Votes after the Voting-Period!
7) It's Okay to Discuss the Covers but if you Think Someone's Entry Doesn't Fit the Theme or Violates the Rules, you Don't need to Argue it in the thread, Simply Don't Vote for It!
8) Plus: Occasionally Voting will Result in a Tie! The Person Who Started the Thread will do the Counting that Week will Usually call for a TIE-Breaking --Vote from Someone who has Not Yet Voted!
9) AFTER the Tie-Breaker Vote, Voting Ends and the Winner is Declared by The One Who Started the Thread (or assigned surrogate) and Thus will do the Counting.

[The Darknight Detective]

An example of zero gravity in space.

RIP Stephen Hawking

[seismic-2]

My reason for selecting this cover isn't so much for the cover itself as for the story behind it. This Gladstone issue reprints a Carl Barks story from 1944 in which Donald Duck makes a reference to CH2:



This particular chemical compound, however, didn't actually exist - then. However, Donald was just being ahead of his time (as was often the case, both in Barks stpries and in those by Don Rosa). Here's the story:

In 1963, the Disney Studio learned just how wide and faithful a readership Barks had. A letter arrived from Joseph B. Lambert of the California Institute of Technology, pointing out a curious reference in "The Spin States of Carbenes," a technical article soon to be published by P.P. Gaspar and G.S. Hammond (in Carbene Chemistry, edited by Wolfgang Kirmse, New York: Academic Press, 1964). "Despite the recent extensive interest in methylene chemistry," read the article's last paragraph, "much additional study is required.... Among experiments which have not, to our knowledge, been carried out as yet is one of a most intriguing nature suggested in the literature of no less than 19 years ago (91)." Footnote 91, in turn, directed readers to issue 44 of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories. It seems Donald's reference to CH2 in panel 2.1 was years ahead of its time: the existence of this elusive chemical intermediate had not been proven in 1944.
"The inclusion of this footnote in a quite scholarly article," Lambert explained, "stemmed from the discovery that Dr. Gaspar ... and I shared a mutual, and independently long-standing esteem for the adventures of Donald Duck. We both had retained copies of some of the classic adventures. It was Dr. Gaspar who rediscovered this early mention of carbene."

Other members of the scientific community sought out the reference. A year later, the Studio received a letter from Richard Greenwald, a scientist at Harvard. "Recent developments in chemistry have focused much attention to species of this sort," Greenwald commented. "Without getting technical let me say that carbenes can be made but not isolated; i.e. they cannot be put into a jar and kept on a shell. They can, however, be made to react with other substances. Donald was using carbene in just such a manner, many years before 'real chemists' thought to do so."

The telltale panel has since been used to illustrate an article by Robert A. Moss ("Carbene Chemistry," Chemical and Engineering News, 16 June 1969) and a textbook by Robert Morrison and Robert Boyd (Organic Chemistry, 3rd Edition, Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1973).

Here, you can see it cited in that textbook:

[MRP]

Decided to change mine up...



I love Jim Ottaviani's science comics.

-M

[Tami]

[PaulBullion]