PeterAnthony

August 3, 2011 1:56 pm Good picks, Ryan. One of the main things I appreciated from reading Y The Last Man was its sociological context in its storytelling; something you don't always get from reading comics. But Ellis's Ocean or Orbiter would have been good additions to this list (runner-ups, I suppose they are called).

January 11, 2011 12:08 pm Prior to reading Logicomix, the only real tangible thing I knew about Bertrand Russell was from a quote said in Shawn of the Dead: "As Bertand Russell once said, 'The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.' I think we can all appreciate the relevance of that now"

Encouraged by fellow comic readers, I took part in reading this and was pulled into this historical universe. Ryan talks about the meta-narrative structure and this is what I appreciated most about the reading process of the book. It had a sort of French new-wave element to it, when suddenly our main protagonist is talking directly to you in the camera about the current story at hand; the outet narrative of the writers, artists and friends describing their process and struggle in telling this story provided an unofficial "making of" feature that one would find hand in hand with a movie.
But overall, what I walked away with, Ryan was able to capture into a sentence: "At the end of the day this book is about a group of people so wickedly smart they spent their entire lives trying to understand each other’s brilliance, so the authors of this book don’t expect this to be a treatise on what they had to say, rather how their lives informed their work and their humanity."
Great write-up, Ryan!