Richard Feynman’s own greatness, as the novel suggests, seem to have had very little effect on him. 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.

And as evident from its retelling of Feynman’s story, here is a man who never really grew up. What better way to tell the story of the life and work of the legendary physicist then, than a graphic novel.Ī graphic novel is just a comic book trying to sound all grown up. 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. His lectures on physics and talks, still popular online, are a lesson on how to explain complex issues simply. Feynman made physics accessible, like few others before him (and few others after him) have. 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. In Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick’s retelling of Feynman’s story, the physicist is presented as a man who never really grew up. The cover of Feynman, a graphic novel on the Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character (it was published in 1985, when I was in high school). Generations of nerds, starting with my own, have sworn by Surely You’re Joking, Mr. 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.

Naturalist by Jim Ottaviani