Bertrand Russell: Funny-Book Star!

When it’s done properly, writing about
mathematicians can be fantastic—consider the genuinely
mind-altering beauty of a book like Gödel, Escher, Bach or
David Foster Wallace’s underrated Everything and More: A Compact
History of Infinity. Logicomix, a new comic-book biography
of mathematician and logician Bertrand Russell, isn’t as fundamentally
earth-shattering as either of those two books, but it’s as close to it
as comics have ever gotten.

The structure of Logicomix is appropriately complex: At the
end of his life, Russell lectures an audience about his life and
adventures, while in the present day, the creators of Logicomix discuss how best to frame Russell’s life story, arguing about
self-referentiality and how best to portray Russell in comic-book form
all the way through the book. And Logicomix does a solid, fair
job explaining Russell’s complex ideas (how does someone make a comic
book about the making of a 400-page book explaining in great detail why
1 + 1 = 2? With not nearly as many word balloons as you’re probably
imagining right now).

But when you’re wrestling with a comic about the sorts of people who
create formulas to prove that nobody will ever be able to prove
everything with a formula, you should expect more than just a skilled
biography. The art in Logicomix doesn’t do much to engage
Russell’s ideas. It leaves the heavy lifting to the word balloons,
which is exactly the opposite of what a comic book should do. The idea
of a comic book about logic and mathematics should make an artist’s
brain fairly explode with possibility for innovative panel layouts and
an opportunity to visually capture an algorithm in a way the world has
never seen. Instead, the art in Logicomix is “just” beautiful
and economical. Where are the great artistic leaps—the paradoxes
illustrated in panels that are themselves paradoxes on the page?
Logicomix is an admirably capable biography of a man who changed
the world with his brain, but it could have been a book that itself
changed a medium.

Christos H. Papadimitriou reads from Logicomix Fri Oct 9,
Town Hall, 7:30 pm, $5.