“A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.” -Bertrand Russell

Logicomix: An Epic Search for The Truth
By: Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou
Drawing: Alecos Papadatos
Color: Annie Di Donna

    Logicomix is an intriguing combination of history and fictional narrative in comic book form.  The main story follows famous logician, Bertrand Russell, is his life-long quest to build the foundation of mathematics and in his relentless search for truth.  Russell’s tale is narrated by Russell himself through flashbacks in a speech that he is giving at a public lecture in an American college about the role of logic in human affairs.  This central narrative transitions in and out where we witness the two writers of the book, and the artists, sitting in their studio or walking around modern day Greece discussing the themes of the book or occasionally explaining certain situations.
    Logicomix begins with writer Apostolos Doxiadis introducing himself to the reader and explaining his thoughts and intentions upon beginning writing the book.  Soon he discontinues his break of the “fourth-wall” and the story kicks off with the introduction of the artists and Christos Papadimitriou, a professor of computer science at Berkeley, who they have brought in to help with the more “logic-heavy” parts of the book.  The narrative of the writers and artists progresses such that writer Doxiadis, and artists Papadatos and Di Donna have been working on this project for some time and have brought in Christos who needs to be “brought up to speed” (coincidentally bringing us, the reader, up to speed as well.)
    The Bertram Russell narrative concentrates certainly on Russell’s mathematic endeavors but it also highlights many other themes in his life.  The main other theme is the extreme search for logic and the connection it seems to have with madness.  Russell has a many run-ins with madness starting in his childhood and continuing on into his later life, which leads him paranoid about the stability of his own mind.  Themes like this that appear in the story lead the readers to begin to think of Russell not as a historical figure but instead as an actual character in a story.  This creates for a book that straddles a fascinating line between what we commonly think of when we consider comic books and often what we think of when we contemplate historical fiction or even biographies. 
    The fictional bits of the story are things like when Russell meets certain famous logicians that he didn’t actually meet in his real life (such as Gottlob Frege, Henri Poincare, David Hilbert, etc…) or in the invention of certain causes of the thinking of Russell himself.  However, though these logicians didn’t necessarily meet in real life, they were inspired by each other’s works in a time where mathematic and logical thinking were making extreme strides.  For those who aren’t really familiar with the subjects discussed, you’ll find that the concepts that are mentioned are explained extremely clearly, and, you’ll walk away knowing a lot more about the time line of these discoveries.  It is a very clear illustration of how one idea led to the next idea, which then led to the next idea.  And all of this information is presented, as I said in a very clear way in tandem with very crisp artwork.  The illustrations are clever and simple and work very well contrasted with the sometimes heavy subject matter.  Though occasionally when the subject matter is less complicated the artwork tends to be too simple and not as appealing (if you’re interested in this “phenomena” I suggest reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud – he has a fascinating explanation for considering the pairing of complicated language with simple imagery or vice versa.  It is also just a great book for those interested in making comics or just comic fans in general).
The transitions in and out of Russell’s flashbacks or from Russell’s story to the story of the writers and artists are always extremely and surprisingly fluid.  Although it seems like often the transitions from Russell’s narration to the creator’s conversations are often just a preemptive strike to silence the potential critiques of the readers.  One character will bring up an objection to something in the story that the reader might just be thinking of and another writer will “conveniently” explain it away.  Or, often the story will break to explain an idea further, which certainly is helpful to those readers who don’t understand something or aren’t familiar with certain terms but somehow this seems too obvious a way of helping the reader along.  The fact that the comic needs to appeal to the “common reader” makes certain things necessary (like stopping the story to “subtly” explain a concept) that interrupt the objective of it to be very much a fictional narrative and not a fact based or historical account.
All in all I think that this comic book brings up many interesting ideas, not just in reflection of the interesting life and ideas of Bertram Russell and those other famous thinkers mentioned, but about what comic books can do and how we can meld genres together to create something that displays subjects in a new light.  Logicomix gives you an example of the good and the bad things that tend to arise from this endeavor.

I give it 5 genius philosophers turned into odd comic book characters out of 10.

-Sarah Q.

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