Tales of Two-Fisted Intellectuals!

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Action Philosophers!: The Lightning Round

It’s a comic book about philosophy. It features Confucius as King Kong, Mary Wollstonecraft beating Jean-Jacques Rousseau with a board, and what I consider to be solid proof that Gottfried Leibniz was a complete gibbering moron.

So, yeah, I love it.

Here’s a quick hit of a couple of panels from their summary of Diogenes the Cynic.

 diogenes1

 diogenes2

The rest of the book is a lot like that — Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey are very good at producing quick, snappy, somewhat goofy summaries of the lives of philosophers and what they believed. I can see professors getting some use out of this stuff — seems like it’d be a good, amusing introduction to philosophy.

I think it’s good fun for general readers, too. Lots of funny stuff here, though if your idea of philosophy is “Be nice to folks and have some fun when you can,” you’re probably gonna get irritated at all the wordy people wearing funny collars. And I don’t necessarily recommend this one for kids — the Life of the Mind is no place for immature brains, and neither are some of the artwork of nekkid philosophers.

Biggest downer: This is the final issue of this series. Luckily, they’re planning on collecting the entire comic in an anthology very soon, and they’ve announced some of their future projects, including “Action Presidents!”

Verdict: Thumbs up. Wish I’d gotten on this bandwagon earlier.

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