Great idea for a comic, poor execution. The use of two frame narratives could have been cool—they might have mirrored the “set theory” that is a major preoccupation of the characters in this comic—but the frame narratives themselves are pretty boring. The first frame involves the writers/artists behind Logicomix debating how to tell their story, and the second frame involves Bertrand Russell giving an autobiographical lecture on whether the U.S. should enter WWII. The authors wanted to connect Russell’s great career ambition (he wanted to discover the foundations of logic and mathematics) to a moral lesson about how we make ethical decisions. But the lesson they arrive at is pretty underwhelming: humans are irrational and Nazis are bad. Okay.

If you want to read a similar (if non-illustrated) book about the theoretical foundations of knowledge and deep ethical quandaries, check out Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World. The stories Labatut tells are riveting. The story that Logicomix tells is dull by comparison. I suspect that the authors hoped Logicomix would make these exciting ideas accessible to younger readers, but I can’t imagine this comic holding their attention for very long.

Part of the problem with Logicomix is that Bertrand Russell isn’t an interesting protagonist. Sure, he lived an unusual life and had an unsual personality, but a lot of the unusual stuff gets left out of this comic. The supporting cast (Gödel, Frege, Wittgenstein) is full of wild personalities, but they don’t occupy enough of the narrative to really make this book as weird and fun as it should’ve been.

Finally, the authors didn’t take enough advantage of the comic format. Seeing Gödel as a little toddler was fun, but apart from that, there’s very little here that utilizes the near-endless visual possibilities of a comic. Most of the time, we’re watching Bertrand Russell just…live his life, have his thoughts, and argue with his colleagues. Not that interesting, visually.

Again, if this is a topic that interests you and if you want a riveting story about the lives of people who push the boundaries of our knowledge about reality, check out When We Cease to Understand the World. Or, if you’ve got endless months of time to read, maybe go back to a classic like Gödel, Escher, Bach. I’ve also heard good things about Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland, Sheilla Jones’s The Quantum Ten, Marcelo Gleiser’s The Dawn of a Mindful Universe, Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist?, or any number of books by Sean Carroll. If you’re looking for a comic book on these subjects, I’m not really sure what to recommend…Logicomix might be your best bet, but the authors could have done better.