Mallows’ Adventures: How to Primate

Abanto, Sheila Anne B.

Primates’ way of parenting relates to the fact that their offspring are intelligent and behaviorally complex compared to the other mammals’ offspring. They give birth to relatively few offspring with relatively long birth intervals followed by pre-adult care that is often characterized as elongated and intensive. This parental investment is stated to be related to increasing the chance of their species survival (Larsen 2019).

The aforementioned parental investment involves primates’ social learning behavior where the juvenile watches its parent demonstrate events that are crucial for their own survival, mainly the building of shelter, acquiring food, and reacting to danger. I have presented these events consecutively as a comic since I have observed that people tend to engage more in images that tell a story instead of paragraphs.

Moreover, I have designed and illustrated everything while keeping it simple since this comic has been my first digital artwork. Throughout the whole comic, I have tried to embody the concept where someone leads by example while the other observes and imitates as a form of their day-to-day activities. The illustrations were packed with things that we usually see in the primates’ environment such as trees, leaves, snakes, and food to help relate more with the context. Documentaries and peer-reviewed articles helped me visualize the setting.

“Mallows’ Adventures: How-To Primate” is intended to be a comic where anybody could learn something just by looking at it with the context of primates’ social behavior in mind. It is also meant to be simple but still enough to catch the attention of people to look at it. Furthermore, I have originally visualized the comics to be presented on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter hence the custom size of the images.