It All Adds Up

Harvey Pekar once said he liked the medium of comics because it could do anything. It doesn't just have to be about superheroes. And then he went on to prove it by taking what could be the most prosaic parts of life and making them entertaining.

Which brings me to Logicomix, a graphic novel that describes, of all things, Bertrand Russell's attempt to put mathematics on a logical footing. This has to be one of the last subjects anyone would figure could make a good story. But (with a fair amount of necessary simplification, not to mention juggling history a bit), it turns into a compelling tale of conquest and madness. We start with Russell's odd childhood, raised by his daunting grandmother, and filled with mystery. We follow him through his intellectual development and watch as he attempts, and (spoiler) fails, to give a new foundation to math. Along the way, we run into a lot of famous names--Cantor, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Godel, von Neumann, Turing and so on. One of the scary things is how many of the people who lived their lives in the realm of logic went crazy.

Authors Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou (the story has a running theme of Greek tragedy) and artists Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna make the story simple enough for anyone to follow, but with enough twists and turns that for over 300 pages you want to know what'll happen next.