CURIOUS AND COMIC

Richard Feynman, physicist, safe-breaker, prankster, seducer of women, prize-winning linguist, artist, member of the Manhattan Project and of a Brazilian samba band, and winner of a Nobel Prize, made physics cool. Generations of nerds, starting with my own, have sworn by Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character (it was published in 1985, when I was in high school).

It is somewhat apt that the best book I have read on Feynman, whose centenary falls this month (he was born on May 11, 1918) is Feynman, a graphic novel by Jim Ottaviani (the writer, a former nuclear physicist himself) and Leland Myrick. Feynman made physics accessible, like few others before him (and few others after him) have. His lectures on physics and talks, still popular online, are a lesson on how to explain complex issues simply. The closest anyone has come to doing this is perhaps the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, whose Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is a must for anyone who wants to sound knowledgeable about physics without really being so. What better way to tell the story of the life and work of the legendary physicist then, than a graphic novel.

A graphic novel is just a comic book trying to sound all grown up. And as evident from its retelling of Feynman’s story, here is a man who never really grew up. I remember having an epiphany about the true nature of genius the first time I read Ottaviani and Myrick’s book (published by First Second) in 2011; that was at a time when I was still writing a weekly column on graphic novels for a newspaper.

Feynman is a straightforward retelling of the physicist’s life, including a brief (and