One of the missions of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) is to attract grade school girls to engineering and technology careers, as well as demonstrate that those fields are both interesting and important. In 2016, the SWE decided to take a different approach than the traditional by producing a comic book that showed the value of engineering while likewise breaking down stereotypes associated with women in engineering.
“The stories and tales presented in the Marvel and DC comic universes have many roots in technology, engineering, and science,” marketing firm David James Group said in a press release about the project. “We saw an exciting opportunity to bridge the world of comic book heroes and the real-world heroes that impact everyday life – engineers. More specifically, women engineers.”
The resulting Constance and Nano comic book series extended to four issues, with over fifteen thousand copies distributed throughout the country in a short two-year span and an additional 800 digital downloads. The series follows the adventures of the teenage Constance, who learns about various engineering principles from a non-superpowered superhero named Nano, then uses what she learned to solve real-world problems that she encounters in her everyday life.
“SWE came to us with a pretty clear idea of what they thought they wanted,” comic book writer Kelly Thompson explained on the SWE Diverse Podcast. “They already had Constance as a character and they knew sort of things about her that they wanted and the general idea of the story they wanted, but they just didn’t know how to get it out there. So that was where I came in, and I worked with Sarah Gaydos, who’s the editor at IDW (Comics), SWE’s publishing partner, to work on a couple pitches for different ways I thought we could tell Constance’s story.”
Having crafted numerous narratives in such comic book series as Captain Marvel, Hawkeye, and West Coast Avengers, one of those pitches inevitably involved the introduction of Nano. “When you do comics, people always think superheroes and so sometimes you like to get away from that, but this was a case where it really seemed to make sense for us,” Thompson said. “And so I came up with Nano as sort of an engineering superhero, sort of like a Batman type in that she doesn’t have any superpowers but her superpower is her giant brain, and she’s sort of developed cool, engineering-based superpowers like flying boots and things like that.”
Despite the presence of a superhero, the emphasis of Constance and Nano is still the teenage Constance. “The idea was really to focus on Constance and her excitement about learning,” Thompson further elaborated. “The way she could take information and then apply that to other problems that she saw in her normal day-to-day life that weren’t necessarily superhero problems. But part of coming up with that and how to execute it required speaking to women engineers about them – OK, so these are real problems that I’ve created but I don’t know how to solve them because I’m not an engineer, so how would you guys solve these problems?”
The resulting team effort resulted in a comic book series that effectively combines everyday life with the field of engineering. The first issue of Constance and Nano, for instance, opens with Constance bundled up in rain gear as she waits for her school bus. The torrential downpour causes a car to swerve in her direction, but fortunately Nano appears to save the day.
“Why does the rain make it so dangerous?” Constance asks. Nano is needed elsewhere, however, and the curious Constance is instead put in touch with two civil engineers at city hall who explain that small culverts under a bridge near her bus stop are the culprit.
“The flow in the river obviously increases in the seasons with heavier rainfall,” they tell her. “And in recent years, the runoff has increased significantly because of upstream development. As a result, the culverts are both too few and too small to handle the flow. The engineering team is surveying the area now. They’re taking flow measurements and examining the site conditions so that a new system can be designed.”
After learning about engineering techniques to keep roads from flooding, Constance applies that knowledge at home, where her mother’s garden likewise floods every time it rains. “The other downspouts must be blocked, so the water is backing up in the gutter and all rerouting to this one, which is then flooding the garden,” she explains to her mom. “We just have to unblock the downspouts and it should get better.”
Constance has another encounter with Nano in the second issue of the comic book series when the plane she is on gets struck by lightning. Constance’s curiosity afterwards entices the teenager to learn about aerospace engineering, while issues three and four of Constance and Nano center on sustainable engineering and climate change.
“I really liked how you can have large problems but then you can also use the skills to solve things in everyday life, which I think a lot of people don’t realize about engineering,” Kelly Thompson noted on the SWE Diverse Podcast. “Engineering is problem solving, we always hear that, but it’s not just problem solving at work – you can apply those skills everywhere.” Thanks to the adventures of Constance and Nano, thousands of teenage girls across the country have reached the same conclusion in a unique and entertaining way.
Anthony Letizia