Everything Explained Through Flowcharts

As part of my day job, I periodically have to create flowcharts. None of my flowcharts, however, are as amusing or engaging as the ones that appear in Doogie Horner‘s brand new book, Everything Explained Through Flowcharts, which goes on sale today (October 26) from Harper Paperbacks. Here’s a snippet of what the book offers: “What if all of life’s greatest mysteries could be explained through ingeniously designed flowcharts? The afterlife, the quickest way to gain a supernatural power, even the ultimate guide for things to say during sex, all broken down into charts even your sixth grade English teacher (the one who made you do all those brainstorming diagrams) would be impressed by. Fortunately for humanity, comedian and graphic designer Doogie Horner has done just that” with this new book. You may recognize Horner from his recent appearance on NBC’s America’s Got Talent where he was the only comedian in the show’s final 48 contestants. My apologies to Horner for a typo in one of the questions (I meant to type “designing book covers” and inexplicably typed “designing comic books”), but fortunately enough Horner answered my “mistake” question (delightfully I might add) and my “proper” question (equally as delightfully). To get an idea of the flowcharts, here a few excerpted pages on superpowers and fears.

Tim O’Shea: You concede at one point in the book that this book required a great deal of research. Which of the features required the most research or was the most absurd to research?

Doogie Horner: Yeah, I tried to ground all the charts in solid research. So even charts like Alien Sex, where I’m obviously talking about 100% make believe, I researched depictions of aliens in television, film, and of course the numerous nutball testimonials.

Designer Paint Names required a ton of research, and I probably got a little carried away with that one. After I handed in the sixth page of paint name charts, my editor said, “If you hand in one more page of paint names, I will murder you.” WWF Finishing Moves was challenging as well, because even after I figured out what moves to include, I then had to find video or photos of each wrestler executing the move so I could diagram them accurately. However the Heroes and Villains chart definitely required the most research, because I had to find out how many people each hero and villain had killed in each of their films, and that covered 48 characters in 187 films. The numbers still aren’t 100% accurate for that chart, because I found different sources citing different numbers, and there were some kills that were ambiguous (for instance when Chuck Norris just mows down a whole crowd of bad guys with a machine gun), but I tried to be as accurate as possible. I had to use an equation to figure out Godzilla‘s kill count.

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