For the most part I like to think that ChemScrapes doesn’t offend anyone. However, I can’t rule out that pics of viagra adopting a superman pose over a toilet because of a permanent erection (below left), or molecules trying to “couple” without a catalyst (below right) could be off-putting for some. Certainly I have had followers contact me expressing disappointment at my politically themed chemistry cartoons. As a hobbyist, I am not beholden to any publishing standards and as long as community guidelines are not breached, people are free to follow or not. If people don’t get a joke, it is also not really an issue. I learn and move on.

Chemical and Engineering News (c&en) on the other hand does have publishing standards, and therefore so did Sketch Chemistry when it was running. It also mattered if the jokes landed. So, every month my collaborator on Sketch Chemistry (Michael Torrice) and I would go through an alignment process for the panel of the month. Panels are usually submitted as very rough sketches, and the idea is developed from there. Some of the ideas come together very quickly whilst others need some work and refinement to be suitable to engage a diverse audience from multiple backgrounds. Sometimes, what seems like a really funny joke at the rough sketch stage may turn out to be a little obscure, so we need to modify it to be fit for subscriber consumption. Other times, we start and idea and then realise part way through it might not be entirely suitable for the publication.

I thought it would be interesting to take a Sketch Chemistry cartoon and show the process we go through. The example I have picked from February 2019 (shown below) has elements of a joke that was hard to land, as well as some borderline material in terms of publishing standards.

The way this cartoon appears plays on the words of “cell biologists” – cells biologists looking at cells through a microscope, where the the cells are also biologists experimenting on other cells in a microtitre plate. It is quite … safe! The way this cartoon started off was different. I can’t find the original sketch, but it was a thirty second scrawl on a bit of paper that just had a bunch of cells in a plate, a cell outside the plate with a syringe. We shortlisted the rough idea and I started to “work up” the cartoon.

Working up involves me starting to frame the cartoon, position the subject matter, and play around with expressions and so on. While doing this, I often start to think of other possibilities and layers of jokes that could go into the more refined cartoon. I decided my original idea “cell biologist” idea was OK, but I felt the cartoon needed a bit more tension and visual humour. So, I introduced a syringe full of bleach (pre-COVID, not inspired by Trump), made some of the cells in the plate obviously worried about what was going to happen. One was even trying to escape. Then I introduced another cell asking if the one holding the syringe had ethics approval. For me, it wasn’t enough for the cell biologist to be asked about ethics approval, I wanted to suggest that the experimenter didn’t have it and had been found out, signified by the “uh-oh”.

To the editorial team the suggestion of impending death to the cells in the plate was considered borderline in terms of publishing standards, not to mention the nefarious behaviour of the cell biologist. At least it was wearing full PPE. It was decided to tone it down a bit, and it was suggested to introduce a scene with a microscope into the cartoon. The idea was to lose the syringe, make the cell biologists nice and ethical, and ensure there were no scared faces. I struggled to execute this idea.

I ended up going 100% in the opposite direction where I tried to do all the plays on all the words. I decided to introduce the new panel as a prison scene into the cartoon. In this scene, incarcerated cell biologists are in a prison cell and they are looking through a microscope at some … cell biologists (see below).

It’s not surprising that the feedback was that I had overcomplicated the cartoon and we now had a backstory to explain. What are the biologists doing in prison? How do they have glassware when they are in jail? Do prisons even do cell biology? It was suggested that perhaps we move the scene to a lab scenario so there is less explaining to do (below left). My first cut is shown below where we made it seem as if the cells were applying for a job. Visually, c&en were happy enough, but the dialogue I came up with was too clumsy. Michael came in and tidied up the dialogue as shown in the final cartoon (extract below right) as he did so many times in our collaboration.

So there you have it! The evolution of a Sketch Chemistry cartoon. To be honest, my favorite is the bleach-wielding, renegade cell biologist. What do you think?