The trouble with writing any feature on non-fiction comics is that it risks becoming a Jim Ottaviani column pretty fast. The man has written so many wonderful comics — chiefly about scientists and their discoveries — that his work could easily dominate any discussion of comics as historical or scientific teaching tools. And so, taking it as granted that this will probably not be the only excursion into Ottaviani’s work that I’ll be taking with this column, this month the spotlight is on Feynman, Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick’s portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist.
In this colourful and light-hearted biography, Ottaviani and Myrick quickly get across that Feynman probably wouldn’t have liked being referred to as a “Nobel Prize-winning” scientist — not solely, anyway. He didn’t have much interest in accepting the Nobel at all, and didn’t intend to until he found out it would be impractical to turn it down. A colourful character whose interests encompassed art and music as well as physics, Feynman’s career was distinguished by his involvement in the Manhattan Project as well as his groundbreaking work in the field of quantum electrodynamics. Along the way he got married three times, cracked safes for fun, did sketches of topless dancers, and worked out equations on beaches in Rio (he drew his famous diagrams in the sand).
Spinning all this material into a loose series of anecdotes, the first-person narrative that Ottaviani and Myrick set down in Feynman is lively as well as touching. Focusing for the most part on Feynman’s eccentric approach to scientific endeavour, the creators manage to get in a nicely realistic sense of how this famous thinker went about, well, thinking. Scientific thought was a part of his everyday life, and followed the rhythms of his personality — it wasn’t just a creature of the university campus. Sharing and applying his ideas was always a matter of first importance, even if he didn’t always know how to go about it.
The science in question, however, doesn’t really come to the forefront until the book’s latter half. Which is to say, Feynman’s early theoretical work as well as his time at Los Alamos are largely narrated in view of their practical and social consequences, with the personalities of the scientists involved getting special attention. This may well be irritating to some readers — no talk of science when the freaking atomic bomb is being invented? — but the implication is that Feynman hadn’t gotten his ideas down as clearly as he wanted to at that time. It’s only when we get to the late 70s and early 80s, when Feynman realizes that’s he’s going to have to understand his own theories better if he’s going to deliver effective lectures on them, that we get down to nuts and bolts.
As Feynman tries out his lectures on new audiences, Ottaviani and Myrick dispense with the light, anecdotal tone, and present two of the lectures pretty much as-is. These are laid out with both intelligibility and style, depicting Feynman in his lecture hall and letting colourful diagrams invade the pages. But just as the anecdotal content of the book may bother readers who are more interested in the science, the hard science here does represent something of a drastic departure, and may be a stumbling block for readers more interested in biography. If this book has a central flaw, it’s this duality, this obvious shifting of gears toward the latter half which leaves one with the general impression that a more integrated approach right from the beginning might have read more smoothly.
Another aspect of the book that is troubling (although for different reasons) is the way it downplays the moral and ethical implications of Feynman’s involvement in the Manhattan Project. Feynman himself isn’t portrayed as having thought about it at length until decades later, and even then these doubts don’t wind up being afforded much space, at least compared to all the time spent relating anecdotes. Looking at this tendency alongside the lack of scientific detail regarding the Manhattan Project, the whole enterprise at Los Alamos comes across as faintly unreal, something divorced from the rest of the biography. It’s hard to overstate the impact of the atomic bomb on the course of the 20th century, and put simply, to see the story of its creation so understated here is more than a little strange.
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The art as a whole reflects Feynman’s lighthearted outlook: Leland Myrick’s loose, clear lines seem to form expressive faces and gestures almost by accident, getting across a relaxed doodle-art feel despite an absence of extraneous detail. The scientific diagrams have the same effortless feel while maintaining precision, and are always easy to scan. And while there’s some inconsistency in style (the poses in the beginning are a little stiff, and improve over the course of the book), Feynman himself comes across wonderfully. You almost get a sense of his tics and habitual gestures, with his general air coming off as familiar and inviting — just like the memory of a favourite professor, maybe blurred and idealized a little by the passage of time.
Hilary Sycamore’s excellent colouring work, meanwhile, lights up each page with a variety of bright tones — appropriate enough, since Feynman was a synesthete and saw numbers in a rainbow of colour. Pairing up beautifully with Myrick’s simple lines, the impact of the colour is such that even banal scenes — Feynman in a hallway, Feynman in a hotel room — hit like a jolt of caffeine. Overall, this is one great-looking book, and its relative consistency in this respect does do something to balance out the uneven aspects of the narrative.
As mentioned, the scientific content in this book is somewhat limited, and as an educational tool it would likely fit in best at the university level, offering some further detail into 20th century methods of scientific inquiry as well as providing a bit of levity in a course focusing on the history or philosophy of science. Fans of Thomas Kuhn’s theories will also find a lot to enjoy here, as Feynman finds himself bumping his head on his era’s established scientific paradigm, and subsequently expanding small aspects of it, in just the way Kuhn describes. For the casual reader, there’s an extensive list of recommended titles at the back — not to mention a fun story about one of Feynman’s collaborators. All in all, if you’re looking for a breezy way to learn about one of the 20th century’s iconic scientists — and you like the idea of getting a small taste of the basic concepts of quantum electrodynamics, too — you couldn’t do much better than Ottaviani and Myrick’s Feynman.
