This article traces the reception of a “science comic book” by various audiences including readers and reviewers after publication as well as grant application review committees vetting the proposed project in its conceptual stage. Specifically, the work is a biology textbook containing comics-style visual explanations couched in the form of an imaginative story interwoven with and supplementing traditional text-based explanations of the same ideas. The analysis uses Genette’s concept of “paratexts” (i.e., a class of speech genres comprising those supplementary texts that contextualize and inform readers’ interpretations of the primary text that they accompany) to examine the rhetoric of the visual in the discourse of science education. This analysis observes that the stigmatization of comics as a medium played some role in how readers, critics, and reviewers responded to the text. The implications of this stigma for cultural conceptions of science and their relationships to other knowledge domains, including the arts and humanities, raise a concern for the mediation of public impressions of science as an institution.

This paper weaves together several elements to construct a reception study in the rhetoric of science, reflexively applied to the rhetoric of science itself as a field. This analysis supplements a reading of the criticial reception to Alan Gross’s The Rhetoric of Science and its transformation into Starring the Text (i.e., a renamed “third edition”) with an examination of citation data regarding Gross’s book. The citation data provide some support for the idea that many of Gross’s readers perceived him as taking a position in the “Science Wars” of the 1990s. The essay builds a theory of “citation contexts” (that is, how scholarly work is cited in text) out of Steve Fuller’s concept of interdisciplinary interpenetration, and shows that Gross’s work may be used differently within articles appearing in communication- and rhetoric-related journals than in those published in science studies and other journals. The analysis contributes to the ongoing project of disciplinary self-reflection in the rhetoric of science, and provides additional information about Alan Gross’s singular place in the field.