AL, Comical

 

AL, Logical, available on Kickstarter until March 5th!

Perhaps the question that have come up the most in discussing AL, Logical with people:

Why a comic book?

Time passes between panels, and it's especially good when we are seeing problem-solving. Something happens. She's THINKING. 

The reader's perspective can be quite different than in prose. Xavier (coauthor, pencils, inks, colors and letters!) is especially strong on showing action instead of telling about it. When the house is moving, we don't see the house changing, we see the elder god seeing the house changing (we see it in its eye). It's humanizing.  Comic books help you to take the perspective of the people in the story. We see AL the way the mathematician sees her, and vice versa. 

And then there are all the joyful little visual tricks he does, like "hey there" backwards in Chapter 4. Fun, but also serves the story. It also offers the reader a chance to notice. Also in Chapter 4 there are a lot of clocks. What's happening with them? 

A big part of our impetus for writing the book is that I see math as being all about problem solving, and he sees art as being all about problem solving. And he does a lot of problem solving throughout the book, which gives readers two ways into AL's problem solving experience.

In a sense, the comic book format literally allows the reader to see math how we see it. 

This might be just because we are a comic book loving family (well, 3/4 of us and one patient parent), but comics are a story form that invites rereading. Even a 70ish page comic like this one is about like three issues of a comic book. Readers have taken from a half an hour to an hour to read it, almost inviting you to pick it back up, look at specific pages, see if the beginning makes sense with the end... go where your attention takes you. Partly because of the story, and mostly because of Xavier's art, the comic really offers a lot of chances to make connections as a reader, and to notice AL making connections in her thinking and experiences.

There are some other math comic books (see the list at the end of the AL, Logical page on the blog), but this one is pretty distinct from those. As fond as I am of them! In our comic, we really worked to make it about the narrative, not a math lesson in disguise. While still having fun, real mathematics.

Please take a look, and help us spread the word.

PS> My previous blog post about the book goes into some of the relevant frameworks behind the math content and the math processes we get to see in the story.