Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Action Philosophers!


Action Philosopher! is a humorous non-fiction comic written by Fred Van Lente with Ryan Dunlavey on art duties. The series explains the philosophy and lives of various philosophers throughout history in a humorous and simple way that the average Joe can understand.
The comic often will have straight-forward, simple explanations of the philosophies with humorous cartoons often with pop culture references. It at times it homages famous cartoonists such as Jack Kirby, Bil Keane and Charles M. Schulz. The series has been praised by Philosophy Now and was nominated for an Ignatz Outstanding Debut Award.

  • Issue 1 features Plato, Bodhidharma, and Nietzche. This issue has the series' most famous line: "PLATO SMASH!".
  • Issue 2 is the "All Sex Special". This features Ayn Rand, Thomas Jefferson, and Saint Augustine.
  • Issue 3 is titled "Self Help for Stupid Ugly Losers". This touches on Freud, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell.
  • Issue 4 is called the "World Domination Handbook". This focuses on Karl Marx, Machiavelli, and the Kabbalah.
  • Issue 5 is entitled "Hate the French". Descartes, Sartre, and Jaques Derrida are the focus here.
  • Issue 6 is "The People's Choice" issue. People actually got to vote for the people that appeared in this issue. The winner were Kierkegaard, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
  • Issue 7 is titled "It's All Greek to You". This was various Pre-Socratics philosophers, Aristotle, and Epictetus.
  • Issue 8 is the "Senseless Violence Special". This talks about Kant, Schopenhaur, Hegel, and John Stuart Mill.
  • Issue 9 (and the final issue) was "The Lightning Round". We got a helping of Diogenes the Cynic, Lao Tzu, Micheal Foucault, Confucius, David Hume, George Berkeley, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Gottfried Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza.
My sources were the trade paper back The More Than Complete Action Philosophers! (which rearranged the stories to be chronologically correct) and the Wikipedia Page "Action Philosophers!"

No comments:

Post a Comment