ACTION PHILOSOPHERS!

I drop by the local comic book store from time to time. There are several alternative comic books I keep up with and I am always ready to see a new comic experimentation.

Take for example what I bought today. It has three heros in it with their own stories: Rene' Descartes, Jean-Paul Sartre, amd Jacques Derrida.

I just flipped through the comic and have not read it in detail yet, but it looks like it is rich in humor and satire. It mixes their philosophies with our present current events.

I hope it sells well.

I ran a Google search and found a lot of stuff about the comic book and its creators. Here is one part of one review that seemed to describe the comic pretty good.

PHILOSOPHY, FUN? VAN LENTE & DUNLAVEY TALK "ACTION PHILOSOPHERS"
by Justin Jordan, Guest Contributor
Posted: October 6, 2005


"Action Philosophers" #3 "Action Philosophers" #4
When you think of action, only one name springs to mind: Plato.

Okay, maybe not, but if Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey have anything to say about it, it soon might. They're the creators of the new Xeric Award winning comic book series "Action Philosophers," a series detailing the life and thoughts of some of history's greatest thinkers through Van Lente's slightly warped humor and artist Dunlavey's dynamic, cartoon influenced art.

Instead of a dry treatise on deep thoughts, you get Bodhidharma's students trying to get him to teach them to learn the "gaze so hard it drills holes in mountain" trick to help them pick up girls, or Isaac Newton strangling Dunlavey for drawing him getting hit on the head by the apple. It's not your ordinary book on philosophy.

"The title, sure, is a gag-- and has led a bunch of people who haven't read the book to think it's about philosophers dressed as super heroes beating on each other-- but to me it also implies that thinking is an active process," Van Lente told CBR News. "Most of the stories are as much about how that philosopher reached the conclusions that he did, based on his or her biography and what he or she went through or was exposed to in his or her early life. To me that's the most inspiring and gripping thing about reading these tales-- to follow exactly how the philosopher went from one position to the other, and (oftentimes), altered the course of human history in the process."

Philosophy and humor might seem like a strange fit to most, but to series writer Van Lente, it's a perfect fit.