Gross Science

Jack Keely sits in a sunlit Silver Lake cafe, eating an organic beef burger while discussing snot, boogers and eye gunk. Spread before him is the children’s “Grossology” science book series he illustrated. On one page, a man with a giant leaking faucet for a head drips near a factoid about noses. (Did you know they make a fresh batch of snot every 20 minutes?) On the diarrhea page, a singing toilet regales readers with this bon mot: the Kayap Amazonian tribe has 100 different words for diarrhea.

Publisher Planet Dexter calls it “stealth learning,” and apparently it works: “Grossology,” the first of five such books written by Sylvia Branzei, rose to No. 2 on the Publisher’s Weekly bestseller list for children’s nonfiction in 1996. Keely’s illustrations, as mad as Don Martin’s, as playful as Dr. Seuss’ and as demented as Edward Gorey’s, have since graced “Animal Grossology,” “Grossology Begins at Home,” “Virtual Grossology” and “Hands-On Grossology,” along with some very gross calendars.

Keely’s characters have even gone animatronic. They’re featured in a $4-million walk-through traveling Grossology exhibit now in Toronto and Edmonton. Visitors enter through the mouth, churn in the stomach and, no doubt through peristalsis, travel through the intestines to an indecorous exit. Along the way there’s the vomit machine and a pinball game that racks up gas points depending on which foods are hit. (Beans, 4,000!)

“I strive to create drawings that give you that eeww feeling, but without losing your lunch,” says Keely, 48, who draws in his Elysian Heights apartment studio. “I don’t want to give kids nightmares.”

Grossology may seem light fare, but the books actually brim with detailed scientific explanations. Karen Willhoite, a Clovis, Calif., science teacher, says students beg her to read from the series; a Humboldt County school nurse once pleaded in an e-mail, “When will your puberty book be out?”

Keely, adjusting his green-and-gold plaid glasses and sliding a black sneaker over a knee, tells of drawing his favorite comic book characters as a boy. Sprawled in the vast attic of a big house in Binghamton, N.Y., he devoured Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost, Homer the Happy Ghost and Casper the Friendly Ghost. While other children dashed through sprinklers, “there lay strange Jack in the toy box, pretending he’s a vampire,” he says.

Influenced by a prodding junior-high art teacher, a father skilled in leather and metalwork and a mother who hauled bags of supplies home from the art store, Keely attended Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. More than 30 Keely-illustrated children’s books later, the artist says courses in anatomical drawing didn’t help. “My teachers would ask if I hated the human body because I never drew it,” he says. “I always distorted it.”

At the cafe, Keely douses his burger with ketchup and flips to a scratch-and-sniff page featuring, well, projectile vomit. “I don’t recommend trying it,” he says, dabbing his mouth. “Because then your book smells like barf.”

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The Icky List

What really turns “Grossology” illustrator Jack Keely’s stomach:

SCALLOPS. “I always feel as though I’m eating earlobes.”

ROSES. “They look like rolled-up toilet paper stuck on the end of a very dangerous stick.”

SWANS. “Big, fat bodies attached to these weird, probing necks.”

SHAG CARPETING, CRYSTAL FIGURINES AND FAUX ANYTHING. “I’d rather have a real piece of plastic than a fake piece of wood.”

GRATUITOUS VIOLENCE IN COMIC BOOKS. “Shower slasher scenes in comic books? Where’s Little Lulu when you need her?”