Synopsis:

The award-winning graphic novelist takes you on a tour of his recent projects.

Award-winning cartoonist Peter Kuper transports readers through the 400-million-year history of insects and the remarkable entomologists who have studied them.

This visually immersive work of graphic nonfiction dives into a world where ants, cicadas, bees, and butterflies visit a library exhibition that displays their stories and humanity’s connection to them throughout the ages. Kuper’s thrilling visual feast layers history and science, color and design, to tell the remarkable tales of dung beetles navigating by the stars, hawk-size prehistoric dragonflies hunting prey, and mosquitoes changing the course of human history.

Kuper also illuminates pioneering naturalists, from well-known figures like E. O. Wilson and Rachel Carson to unheralded luminaries like Charles Henry Turner, the Black American scholar who documented arthropod intelligence, and Maria Sybilla Merian, the seventeenth-century German regarded as the mother of entomology.

Galvanized by the sixth extinction and the ongoing insect crisis, Kuper takes readers on an unforgettable journey.

Presenter:

Peter Kuper's illustrations and comics have appeared in publications around the world, including Mad Magazine, where he has written and drawn “SPY vs SPY” for 29 years, The New Yorker, and The Nation. He is the co-founder of World War 3 Illustrated, a political graphics magazine. He has produced over two dozen books, including: The System, Diario de Oaxaca, Ruins, and adaptations of many of Franz Kafka's works into comics, including The Metamorphosis and Kafkaesque. He was the recipient of the 2024 RFK Journalism Award and a 2025 Herblock award for cartooning. Peter teaches

comics at Harvard University.