ABAC FEATURED IN NATIONAL COMIC BOOK

Abraham Baldwin College is really making a name for itself—and not just as an educational institution. ABAC was recently featured in the national comic book Dexter’s Laboratory, thanks to the clever ideas of Dr. Earl Bennett, a professor in ABAC’s Division of Science and Mathematics.

Bennett came up with the idea to use ABAC in the comic book when his daughter, Erin, called him last fall and told him that her boyfriend, Matt Jenkins, needed some type of math symbols to go onto a blackboard in the comic. Jenkins does penciling for DC Comics, and

for the last year or so he has been working on issues of Dexter's Laboratory. He is given the basic story line and then draws the characters and backgrounds and decides the layout of the panels for the story. 

“Dexter is a boy genius and was supposed to be working on something of great scientific importance,” Bennett said. “So I gave Matt formulas that illustrated the method of using triple integration from calculus to find the volume of a quarter-cylinder—the hard way. Since the equations had integration, square roots, inverse trigonometric functions, and the answer came out to be pi, I thought this would be pretty clever. But what I really wanted to do was work something personal into the formulas as a sort of inside joke. I finally decided to use ‘ABAC’ as a subscript to the volume variable.” 

Jenkins made the formula fit into the space allotted and abbreviated a little, but the basic structure remained intact. At the very beginning in the upper left hand corner of the chalkboard is the “ABAC” subscript.  The issue of Dexter’s Laboratory depicting this scene came out in April (issue #34).

Jenkins draws regularly for DC Comics and has done issues of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Dexter’s Laboratory, and others. Besides drawing for comics, he and his business partner, Chris McMurray, own Wild Hare Studios in Atlanta and New York. They specialize in animation, doing a lot of work for Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon.

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