Summer Reading (With Pictures)

Being all about the comics as I am, I thought it might be useful for me to recommend some long-form comics (the trade wants to call them “graphic novels,” but they aren’t always novels) that would be of interest to you thoughtwrestling types:

1) Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli. This veteran writer and artist left a promising career in superhero comics, working with Frank Miller on Daredevil and Batman: Year One, to self-publish an ambitious anthology called Rubber Blanket and to adapt Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass. It was a wonderful surprise for Mazzucchelli to publish anything substantial 15 years later, especially a work as accomplished as Asterios Polyp.

After a lightning bolt sets his New York apartment on fire on his 50^th birthday, “paper architect” Asterios Polyp leaves behind his old life to work as a car mechanic, unraveling the mistakes he has made in life while expounding about art, philosophy, religion and much more. Polyp is an interesting character on his own, but Mazzucchelli has created a truly transcendent piece of work by using a variety of graphic and colour techniques to illustrate people’s emotions and interactions, particularly effectively as he traces the history of Polyp’s failed marriage.

Asterios Polyp is one of the greatest books, comic or not, of the century so far.

2) Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie DiDonna. Another ambitious graphic novel, this one is the biography of an actual person, mathematician and logician Bertrand Russell.

This book has been pretty visible for a while, on bestseller lists and such, and in a way it is like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time; a successful attempt at exposing the public to some very complex ideas. The team of Greek and French authors and artists put themselves into the story, showing their discussions of how to portray Russell and his work, providing further exposition where necessary.

Russell is best known as the co-author of the Principia Mathematica, an attempt to demonstrate to the world at the dawn of the 20^th century that mathematics had to be based on proofs, as opposed to axiomatic “common knowledge.” He contested that by applying math and logic to all things in the world, we would be able to correctly understand it. The book depicts the various reactions of his peers to these ideas, and the chilling applications of flawed logic in the world wars- as well as the contributions of mathematics to defeat tyrants. If you ever thought that math was boring, you will not after reading Logicomix.

3) Carnet de Voyage by Craig Thompson. This is a more personal piece of work; a travel diary by the artist of his three-month visit to France, Barcelona, the Alps and Morocco, combining a publicity tour for his excellent graphic novel Blankets with research for his as yet unpublished next work.

Thompson mixes impressive sketches of local buildings and people with an ongoing discussion of his own anxieties, from missing a former girlfriend to dealing with acute arm pain to worrying that Europeans will hate him because he is an American. He also offers some interesting perspectives on the act of creating artwork, especially drawing by hand. Carnet de Voyage is a compelling and often amusing piece of work, ideal for those who like to spend their summers traveling or just dreaming about getting away.

Related posts:

1. The power of reading wide and deep
2. Why and how you can get better at reading