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Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, story by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou, artwork by Alecos Papadatos and Annie DiDonna, is a hugely successful graphic novel about a most unlikely subject, the life of Lord Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), logician, mathematician, philanderer, and pacifist, and his pursuit of a true and accurate system of logic.  Or, as the New York Times said, “Well, this is unexpected — a comic book about the quest for logical certainty in mathematics.”

Logicomix begins with panels depicting its creators, the writers and artists, as they contemplate how to create such an unusual book.  The story then moves to a speech given by Russell in 1939, as Hitler begins to lay waste to Central Europe, and Russell is sought for his pacifist views.  In his long oration, Lord Russell describes his life and his obsessive efforts, with Alfred Whitehead, to find an impregnable logical system; and so most of Logicomix is told in the flashbacks that Russell outlines to his audience.  The story, which is basically true to historical fact (though some liberties were taken for dramatic effect) is amazingly compelling.  (To my shock, I devoured Logicomix faster than either Robert Crumb’s Book of Genesis or Alan Moore’s incredible Watchmen, to name the great graphic stories I have recently plugged in this series.)  The relationship that developed between Russell, by then a failure in his own eyes — except for the insight known as “Russell’s Paradox,” which punched a great big hole in set theory — and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, a precocious terror if ever there was one on earth, is a stunner and dramatically told.

When Russell’s long address is over, the book ends with the storytellers and the artists attending a production of The Eumenides, the final play of The Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus.  It’s a perfect ending.  Or as the Times reviewer wrote, “Oddly enough, Aeschylus’ trilogy furnishes the concluding wisdom, which, at the risk of triteness, I’ll condense into a mathematical inequality:

“Life > logic”