Stephen Jay Gould: the comic book history of an historian of science -or-ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny, but does the mismeasure of man recapitulate uncle $crooge?

In the early 1980s, Marvel Comics worked on a series of textbooks in comic book form, including one volume that was to be authored by Stephen Jay Gould. This essay uses new archival documents to prove Gould explored a potential collaboration with Marvel, but this project never came to fruition. It then delves further into the Gould archives to reveal selections from Gould's comic book reading in his youth. For example, two Uncle $crooge comics contain stories of Indigenous Peoples defeating Scrooge's twentieth-century capitalism, mirroring the themes of Gould's well-known work, The Mismeasure of Man. This is further supported by the junior high school projects saved in his archives that include a report on political caricatures, also presaging his arguments in The Mismeasure of Man. The influence of comic books on Gould's science is also apparent in the several references he makes to Walt Disney comics throughout his life. For example, one of his motivational stories for a life in science began with Fantasia, and a later essay looked at the ontogenetic progress of Mickey Mouse. Therefore, this article reveals one of the few documentable occasions where a scientist's archives can be used to identify the influence of comic books on their later scientific work.