Apostolos Doxiadis

I read this in the library today in about an hour and enjoyed it a lot. Although it deals with philosophical concepts that I had very little prior clue about, I find it very accessible and compelling. The art style is appealingly vivid and the layers of narrative work well. What I found especially effective was the contrast drawn between the heights of theory and abstraction and the mental and familial stability of those reaching them. The use of the Oresteia at the end was also excellent - I have a soft spot for Greek tragedy.

Now I feel better informed and less intimidated by Wittgenstein et al. If there are other graphic novels about philosophy, I'd be keen to read them.… (more)

If not the most gripping graphic novel I've read, this is certainly on of the most intellectual. It tells a simplified and slightly dramatized life of Bertrand Russell, using the structure of a reflective lecture on logic's application to real life, given in the US in the early days of World War II when the debate about whether to enter the war was hot and heavy. Add yet another framing structure where the co-creators of the book debate the themes of logic and madness, and that Papadimitriou is invited to co-author because as a computer scientist he can explain exactly what Russell, Frege, Goedel, Hilbert, and the others were trying to do and whether they succeeded or not. As both a math major who focused on pure logic, and a computer scientist myself, I can't judge how well the explanation of theory works for others. For me, it felt sincere but incomplete, no pun intended.

Reommended.… (more)

7/10
Grand in scope but let down in part by the medium and some baffling decisions by the creators, Logicomix is still a fascinating read.
I've always loved it when serious topics are explored visually, whether in animation or books - but Logicomix overextends and underextends itself in turn. At the altar of brevity and mass appeal, it sacrifices accuracy, but this wouldn't have mattered so much if the crucial details covered were at the least in-depth, which they were sadly not.
A case in point is that Apostolos mentions Godel, Wittgenstein, Hilbert, von Neumann, and other giants, but he annoyingly glosses over their contributions. The book also repeatedly jumps out and into Athens or the 'real world' instead of the comic world to explain some of its decisions to the reader - but this breaking the fourth wall is only partially effective since its novelty wears off quickly. It is utilized to excellent effect only near the end.
Where the book shines the most is letting its audience know, through comics, about Godel's incompleteness theorem of the first and second-order, Russell's paradox, and Wittgenstein's metaphysical theories - a sentence I could not imagine writing a day ago. And that fact alone is worth most, in not all of, the acclaim.… (more)