Overview

A digitally drawn comic with bold inky lines, colored in shades of blue and orange. All text narration in caption boxes unless otherwise indicated.

Cover

Like Me? A Journey into the Octopus Visual System

Written by Angelique Allen. Illustrated by Finn Hamilton.

Cover Description: A Black woman holds a small octopus in the palms of her hands against a backdrop of crashing waves. She has pointed, finned ears like a sea creature. In the foreground, a large octopus looks directly at the reader with its horizontal pupil.

Page 1

A single image of a sandy beach, clouds crowding the sky above it.

“Hundreds of millions of years ago, there was no life.”

“The world was still, except the wind blowing the dust and the waves crashing on the shore.”

“But, there was no one to listen to the wind, or watch the waves crash.”

“Until there was.”

Page 2

Panel 1: “One day, there was a creative mind with power to slowly change the world around her. Over the course of millions of years, she tweaked, she tinkered, and she fell in love with creating novel solutions.” The woman from the cover stands waist-deep in the middle of the ocean, simple organisms of many different shapes emanating from her.”

Panels 2-5: Close-up of the woman’s hands. She holds several separate chains of atoms that look like colorful pebbles. She closes her hands. She opens them again, revealing a DNA double helix.

Panels 6-8: “Throughout the years, she watched some of her creations thrive and others get wiped away by the elements.” The simple organisms turn into more complicated plants and animals like kelp, sea urchins, and sea stars. These turn into even more complex animals like crabs, eels, and large fish.

Page 3

Panel 1: “Some creations dove beneath the waves, while others soared in the sky. Each had unique traits that allowed them to thrive wherever they found space and resources. Once she had made her way around the world and brought an uncountable number of creations to life, she had the urge to understand them.” The woman examines a microscope slide with one hand, while holding tweezers in her other hand. Her skirt is a large jellyfish. Beneath the water, she has a long eel-like tail and four crab-like articulated legs.

Panel 2: “She started by investigating animals with simple behaviors and nervous systems, building the tools to learn how they work.” A jellyfish, sea star, and sea urchin float in the ocean.

Panel 3: “The more she learned, the more curious she became. Over time, she became fascinated by one of her most unique creations.” An octopus floats in the ocean.

Page 4

Panel 1: Cross section of the front of an octopus head, with labeled “eyes” which connect to two kidney-shaped “optic lobes” which are in turn attached to a central system. The optic lobes and central system are labeled “brain.” “It lived underwater, but transformed into colors not found at depth. It didn’t have any bones. But, its brain was similar in size to some creations with a spine, and their eyes appeared alike. As she compared findings she noted:”

Panel 2: Cross section of the side of an octopus eye. Photoreceptors wire the retina and the optic lobe together across the optic chiasm.

Panel 3: Cross section of the woman’s eye. An optic nerve emerges from the back of the retina. A close-up on the retina shows a layer of ganglion cells which connect to a layer of amacrine cells and bipolar cells, which connect to photoreceptors.

Panel 4: “The cells in the part of the brain that processes vision resembled cells in her own eyes.” A close-up of the octopus’s optic lobe shows the same amacrine cells and bipolar cells in the woman’s eye.

Page 5

Panel 1: “While the shapes of the cells were similar, she knew there was no way she had accidentally modeled them after her own.” The woman looks at a small octopus, saying, “I wasn’t identifying problems and coming up with the best solutions. I just created, left, and saw who was still there when I returned.”

Panel 2: “Driven by curiosity, she applied all the tools she had invented to understand how this brain area, the optic lobe, helped her creation form an image of the world.” An octopus sprawls across the panel.

Panel 3: A laboratory setup in an underwater cave. Rays of light pierce the water to land on a desk with a microscope, several beakers and flasks, and scattered pages of notes.

Page 6

Panel 1: “To understand the brain, she identified the building blocks that make up the cells in the optic lobe.” Cross section of the octopus’s eyes and brain, with a closeup on the layers of neurons in the optic lobe.

Panel 2: Zooming in further on a single optic lobe cell that’s glowing fluorescent yellow, a DNA double helix with each strand labeled with its component parts. “AT CG TA AT GC…”

Panel 3-6: “She started by identifying the sequence of A, G, C, and Ts that all her creations were made of. Then, she tagged all the different building blocks with their own glowing, fluorescent label. When she looked at the building blocks, she realized:” Four neurotransmitters and their receptors: circular, blue “dopamine;” square, red “glutamate;” teal, triangular “acetylcholine;” and circular and square “dopamine and glutamate.” The glutamate neurotransmitter glows fluorescent yellow. “The optic lobe used some of the same blocks that her own eyes used, but these blocks were organized differently.”

Page 7

Panel 1: The woman looks through a microscope at a fluorescent glowing slide.

Panel 2: “Next, she used lasers to see how the cells in the brain responded to different features they see. She relied on fluorescence again, this time tagging calcium to track when a cell activated” The slide shows one neuron glowing fluorescent. Looking even closer at the dendrites branching off the head of the neuron, it’s emitting glowing dots of calcium.

Panel 3:  The lens of the microscope above an octopus on a specimen tray. In the background, a monitor plays a video.  “She played simple movies…”

Panel 4: A waveform squiggles across the monitor.

Panel 5: The octopus brain remains dark and dormant.

Panel 6: The monitor plays a video of wiggling dark and light circles of various sizes.

Panel 7: The octopus’s visual cortex lights up fluorescent yellow.

Page 8

Panel 1: “She revealed that there is a map of what the creation sees inside its optic lobe.” An octopus on a map with dark to light gradient. Its optic lobe is also colored as a map from dark to light gradient.

Panel 2: Cross section of the optic lobe. It has many interior layers. In response to light circles the exterior layer, called the “outer granular layer” and the 3rd layer, the “inner granular layer” light up fluorescent. In response to dark circles, the large inner “medulla” fluoresces. The 2nd layer, the “plexiform” doesn’t respond to either stimulus.

Panel 3: “She noticed cells responded differently depending on their location in the optic lobe. Cells near the surface activated in response to white spots and deeper cells responded more to black spots.” Large blobs of fluorescence in both optic lobes in response to small white spots and large black spots.

Panel 4: “However, the brain responded more to big black spots and little white spots, than little black spots or big white spots.” Smaller patches of fluorescence in the optic lobe in response to large white spots and small black spots.

Page 9

Panel 1: “While she was proud of her discoveries, it only raised more questions about what, and how, this creature sees.” The woman works at her underwater desk, an octopus sprawled across the papers next to her.

Panel 2: The woman’s notes read, “how does the angle of light affect what they see? How do they blend into their underwater environment?”

Panel 3: The rushing ocean and a trailing jellyfish tentacle. “She spent years following up on these questions.”

Page 10

A single image of the woman pulling ocean water into a test tube. She wears clear laboratory goggles. Waves crash behind her. “She knows she won’t ever discover exactly how she made it all, but she knows it is important to ask questions and follow her curiosity, in order to create with purpose. Now, she splits her time between tinkering, engineering new tools, and revealing more about the world she created.”

Back cover

“This comic was created through the University of Oregon Science and Comics Initiative, March 2026. Research done by A.C. Miller, A.D. Kern, D.M. Piscopo, G.C. Coffing, J.O. Songco-Casey, J.R. Pungor, V.A. Allen, in C.M. Nill’s lab.” The front cover’s image wraps around to the back. The shoulders of the woman and curling octopus tentacles are in front of ocean spray and a cloudy sky.