Credit: Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
Like many other cartoon books, the album was pieced together like a movie with wall-to-wall story boards and Doxiadis, who has a film-making background, acting out the characters.
Artists Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna spent three weeks travelling to locations cited in the novel, from Cambridge where Russell studied, to London, Paris, Vienna and the sanatorium in Halle, Germany, where one of his heroes, mathematician Georg Cantor, spent the last months of his life.
Madness plays a prominent part in the novel, and not by accident.
"In this particular branch of mathematics - mathematical logic - there was a very, very high incidence of serious mental illness. That was something we found particularly interesting," the author said.
Shock seller
Originally published in Greek in the fall of 2008, Logicomix enjoyed a successful run at home. But its authors were unprepared for the reception in the United States and Britain, where it sold out on the first day of its release in last month.
The New York Times greeted the comic's U.S. debut with a bemused "well, this is unexpected". It said the story was "presented with real graphic verve" and "for the most part the ideas are conveyed accurately, with delightful simplicity."
"I think the publishers (Bloomsbury) were shocked. I was shocked, too," Doxiadis said. It sped up bestseller lists to occupy top 10 spots in comics, fiction and general book rankings on both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
Unlikely topic for a comic book
"No Greek book has sold abroad like this in 30 years," said Dinos Vrettos, a manager at a major Athens bookstore.
The aim of Logicomix is "to tell a fascinating story about the history of ideas" said Doxiadis, who in 2001 published a novel titled "Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture" about a boy's quest for knowledge on his reclusive mathematician uncle.
"In Logicomix, the story I think is in some ways emblematic of much of what happened in the 20th century, with its search for certainty, for knowledge, and what often went with it, for power over life," he added. "The fact that this idea looked like, to put it mildly, not a very likely idea for a comic book, never deterred me."
Follow Cosmos on Twitter! twitter.com/cosmosmagazine
