For my honors project, I made a comic about a little critter called the Blue-Ringed Octopus. I chose the octopus because I wanted to appeal to a younger audience by showing kids what I loved to see when I was younger: gore. When I was about six, I was absolutely fascinated by a book series my friend owned called Horrible Histories. These books outlined life in different eras, focusing especially hard on all the gory details. While I was reading the series because I was both fascinated and disgusted by exactly how a guillotine worked, I was also learning a lot about the Middle Ages and Roman Empire, subjects I wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise at such a young age.

For my project, the Blue-Ringed Octopus was a perfect candidate for introducing biological concepts through the lens of gore. One unique feature of the Blue-Ringed Octopus is it’s toxin, which can paralyse throat muscles and lead to death. I focused on this toxin for most of my comic, putting emphasis on all the harm it can do to humans, because that scary aspect was what would have interested me if I read the comic when I was younger. However, I also included more ordinary facts about the animal, like it’s diet and habitat, as well as larger scientific terms that kids may not have been exposed to.  That way, I could hook a kids attention with a gory subject, while also teaching them basic biological concepts in a way that doesn’t bore them.