About
Baffled and frustrated by the amount of magical thinking, quackery, and pseudoscience he saw around him, a brave soul sought out to crush these manifestations of ignorance and misinformation the only way he knew how… by drawing goofy pictures of them.
Thus began a web comic endeavor unparalleled in scope and fury. At first, creator Maki Naro set about this quest alone in the darkness.
Then he turned the lights on and realized his drawings were crap. The subconscious could NOT be trusted. So Maki called on his friend, confidante, former Resident Assistant, and ‘Bro’ Nadir Balan to assist him in bearing the slings and arrows of modern day WOO-WOO.
Unable to bear the rocks and arrows thrown at them, they went inside and really got started drawing comics. This is where we find them today. Well, right now they’re probably sleeping, or in the bathroom. What time is it?
Much like the real thing, Sci-ənce! seeks to both educate and entertain, or entercate. It takes comics and commentary and slaps them together into a not-so bitter pill to swallow, which is a horrible metaphor, because let’s face it, when you take the pill called science to treat the illness of bunk, that pill goes in the other end.
So Who is Sci-ənce!?
MAKI (fig. B)
To imagine Maki’s life, one can think of the superposition of the electron. All paths are open to him, and he follows them all at the same time. Only an act of observation can collapse the wave function and reveal his true position in life’s journey. Now imagine that the observer is a slack-jawed high school dropout, and that the incompetence of the observer somehow affects the resulting position.
That is Maki’s life. He is the dead cat.
Maki is also a skeptic. If this was not his parents’ intention, and they had wanted him to grow into a good Catholic boy, then they failed miserably. In fact, you could say they were doing it wrong. You see, Maki did attend Catholic schools through high school, but he was also taught an appreciation of science from a young age, having access to countless books on all sorts of natural studies which fueled his curiosity about the the world. He and his father watched Nova, and it was there that Maki learned the disgusting truth of where babies come from. His bedtime stories were passages from the Odyssey and Norse myths. If this was meant to be some sort of balance in which Maki would choose between the world of science with an appreciation of myth and fantasy or a world of myth and fantasy with an appreciation of science as long as the TV worked and the car got you to church… Then the odds were clearly stacked.
Maki has studied the art of Japanese archery, Kyuudo, for 23 years. He can hit a man from a hundred yards while riding at full gallop. He has only done this once, and he has not been back to Japan since. In 2010, Maki had a animated short he created featured on FunnyorDie.com. This will probably be the high point of his entire career.
NADIR (fig. A)
On May 15, 1252, Pope Innocent IV issued the Ad Extirpanda, The papal bull that authorized the use of torture by the Inquisition for eliciting confessions from heretics. Serious crazy torture. Y’know, the kind they use in movies as an excuse to get hot chicks in period costumes to show some panty-candy.
729 years later, to the day (!), Nadir was born through the froth of the multiverse, and found himself inextricably stuck on this shitty 3 dimensional membrane. Coincidence? Yeah right.
Growing up with a love of the classical style Nadir struggled to join the ranks of arguably the best artists alive today; Comic book artists. To this end he studied at Alfred University and interned at Marvel, learned some stuff, joined some companies, worked as an art director, joined some other companies, worked as an illustrator etc. Basically he draws books. He’s a penciller first and foremost, though color dabbling happens on occasion. If you had to describe him in one sentence you could say he was a script-interpreting fat-fingered graphite-jockey, but I mean, not to his face.
He is also a skeptic.
As a child Nadir always had the nagging suspicion that grown-ups and authority figures were full of shit, and the final nail in the coffin was delivered when, as a teen, he learned that the Great wall of China was nowhere near visible from space. Simple but relevant since this was always referenced as a granted fact. It was then that he started using the skeptical raised eyebrow as his default face during conversation. This expression was subsequently hijacked and used into meaninglessness by Dwayne Johnson but then reused back into relevance by Sam Harris.
Nadir is also an avid Mancala player and has won the Northern Philadelphia Mancala Championship Games twice (2008-2009).
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“Can you smell wh–” Yeah we get it already. Real smelly.- Move
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