Graphic Novels — Not Your Father’s Comics

Comic books have been popular in the U.S since the mid 1930’s, but if you went looking for the latest edition of Superman, The Hulk, or the Classics Illustrated version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea at your local library back then, you were out of luck. Comic books were not acquired by libraries for circulation to their patrons.

Today patrons go to an online catalog, rather than the drawers of the old card catalog to search for materials. A quick search for “comic books” in the David A. Nims Library’s collection returns 44 titles. Expanding that search to the C/W Mars Union Catalog results in more than 10,000 results! What’s going on here?

Well, these books are not really comic books, but what are called “graphic novels.” They can be hard or soft cover, typically are full color, and have titles such as Logicomix, an Epic Search for Truth, Maus : a Survivor's Tale, and The 9/11 Report : a Graphic Adaptation. I have purchased several titles for the Nims library based on enthusiastic positive reviews, and as I catalog them I always skim through them to get a better sense of their content. After I cataloged Logicomix, an Epic search for Truth, I decided this book was too intriguing to put immediately on the shelves, and I checked it out. Reading it frame by frame, I found I was caught up in this book – it was a true page-turner.

I have always been interested in mathematics and philosophy, and I have a passing familiarity with Bertrand Russell and the other mathematicians featured here. But I was never interested in actually reading Principia Mathematica, the three-volume work of roughly 2,000 pages (362 pages to prove 1 + 1= 2?!) which Russell and Alfred North Whitehead wrote over many years in their attempt to construct the foundation of mathematics on symbolic logic. However, reading Logicomix I learned much about Russell’s life and the struggle he and Whitehead endured to write Principia Mathematica, and I was reminded again that mathematics (even arithmetic) could be an all-consuming intellectual discipline. Furthermore, I came to appreciate Logicomix as a substantial literary and artistic achievement. The authors Apostolos Doxiadis, a mathematician turned novelist and filmmaker, and Christos Papadimitriou, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, have created a book of which Carlo Wolff, writing in The Boston Globe, said “reading Logicomix is like stumbling upon the best college class you never expected and settling down for enlightenment.” Imagine, enlightenment from a “comic book!” Barry Mazur, Gerhard Gade University Professor at Harvard University wrote "This magnificent book is about ideas, passions, madness, and the fierce struggle between well-defined principle and the larger good. It follows the great mathematicians--Russell, Whitehead, Frege, Cantor, Hilbert--as they agonized to make the foundations of mathematics exact, consistent, and complete. We see how Gödel illuminates their project. We see the Erinyes of Aeschylus's Oresteia giving up their principle of merciless revenge in favor of considered justice. And we see the band of artists and researchers--and the all-seeking dog Manga--creating, and participating in, this glorious narrative." Other reviews have been just as enthusiastic in their praise for Logicomix. Forget about the categories of "comic book," or even graphic novel, clearly there is a wide-spread consensus that this book is a significant achievement.

If you haven’t already discovered graphic novels, search the David A. Nims Library catalog and check out a selection that piques your interest and curiosity. These books may not change your life (or even your reading habits), but then again they just might.