Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2018 September 21 • Friday

The comics medium often seems at its best when dealing with subjects otherwise found in history books or biographies or any other kind of reference book or text book.

The number of ways writers and artists can create and assemble words and pictures together on pages has enormous potential, and lucky for us, people are tapping into it.

Economix was one such book, being an extremely informative and illuminating guide to economic history and the recent global financial crisis whose effects have not yet vanished.

With a similar title and tackling even more daunting subject matter is Logicomix, a brilliant presentation of, more or less, the life of Bertrand Russell and the ideas (from the worlds of mathematics, logic, philosophy, etc.) and people (Wittgenstein, Gödel, et al.) woven into his story.

The writing is credited to Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitrou and the art to Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna. In a book like this I imagine everybody to be contributing to everything and the creators themselves are part of the story.

There are two framing devices, one being Bertrand Russell giving a lecture to an audience that incldues anti-war protestors who want Russell to sign on to their campaign that the United States not enter World War 2. (Russell was a pacifist who was jailed for his opposition to World War 1.)

The other is the creators themselves, as they discuss the book they're making and argue among themselves about details and directions, serving sometimes as annotations, others as a Greek chorus, a theme that's developed at the end of the book as the Oresteia is used as an epilogue.

Right away I felt that I was in extremely capable hands. This panel was my first clue.

Here you have one of the writers confessing that he needs someone to help him find his way through this territory. And in the right corner you see a backpacker, studying a map. We all need help finding our way sometimes.

Maps themselves are also a theme that returns and becomes important to the story. Having it foreshadowed like this (assuming that it was intentional, as I do) is a great touch.

Elsewhere the combination of word and image are used as simply, elegantly and impressively as a pirouette.

A book like this can't get to everything, of course. Russell's second wife was a very interesting person but not much of a presence here. She probably needs her own book.

But the creators fearlessy dive into very complicated ideas that people spent decades smashing their brains against and manage to convey—I think!—what they're about and why they were considered so important to these specialists.

More relatable and accessible is Russell's personal life, his sad marriages and the plight of his children. More uplifting is his consistent stance against war, the ultimate irrationality.

Apparently this book was a bestseller. It took me years to get around to reading it but I'm very glad I did.