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Is it time for Climate Change: the Comic? | Jonathan Jones

3 Feb

www.guardian.co.uk - science
Could graphic novels could be the perfect way to make sense of the recent IPCC controversy?
Is there anything comic books can't do? Any subject too big, mature or complex to be encompassed by a graphic novel? This is the question that presents itself after reading Logicomix, a gripping account of the lives and ideas of logicians at the beginning of the 20th century.
The creators of Logicomix – writers Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H Papadimitriou, artists Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna – present themselves as characters in their story, showing a comics design studio at work in modern Athens while its team debate their differing views about their historical graphic novel. Is it about character and emotion, or the history of philosophy and mathematics? Is it a tragedy about the failure of logicians to find a fundamental basis for mathematics, or does it have a happy ending in the discoveries of Alan Turing and the birth of the digital era? The comic's creators disagree. So do readers.
Logicomix has a formidable and charming character at its heart: Bertrand Russell, who tells his own story in a speech in the US at the start of the second world war. Looking back to his bizarre Victorian childhood, Russell explains how he fell in love with the idea of truth, a truth that must be established by reason alone – and how this led him to undermine the theory of sets, to attempt to remake mathematics in collaboration with AN Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica (1910), and how this in turn was demolished by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Gödel.
The Berkeley mathematician on the Logicomix team complains in the book that there's hardly any maths in it – but there is more than you would be likely to find in a "literary" novel about these characters. It's as if, having made the great populist gesture of working in the medium of comics, graphic novelists feel free to bring in ideas without the timidity you see elsewhere today.
Comics as the last bastion of intellectual life? Why not? After all, Logicomix is in a tradition of seriousness in this genre that goes back to Art Spiegelman's Maus.
So I wonder: could a graphic novel do justice to the current controversy in climate science? As leaked emails and errors embarrass the science on which an entire politics is based, could a comic depict both the pathos of scientists driven by conviction to possibly suppress or distort data, and the larger picture that overwhelmingly demands urgent action to save the climate? Could it dramatise the motivations of sceptics and eco-warriors?
Perhaps it might end with Pascal's wager, which in this instance means the certainty that if we do nothing and are wrong, we will suffer more than if we do more than is necessary. This epic and frightening situation is surely worthy of being turned into Climatecomix.
Jonathan Jones

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