Leonardo

In the scientific discourse (not the discourse on science but the discourse by scientists), images are no longer just illustrations. Nor are they just part of the evidence produced by a text or discourse. They are, rhetorically speaking, powerful tools for making an argument more attractive, more seductive—which means for some readers also more treacherous—and difficult to refute, as demonstrated by Bruno Latour in his analysis of scientific reasoning as the building of a network of multiple linked cross-references. Images have become a way of writing, exposing, exploring, demonstrating, communicating, in short doing science, with or without the help of a supporting text. Roland Barthes was right in suggesting in his seminal 1961 text on the photographic message that the conventional relationship between illustrated and illustrating medium, that is, between text and image, should be reversed, for in modern communication media it is no longer the image that illustrates the text but the text that illustrates the image. Today this suggestion applies not only to advertisements, the topic of Barthes's analysis, but also to the language of science in general. Thus, there has been such a visual turn in many disciplines—history, for instance, with Michael Lesy's photo-book Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), originally presented as a doctoral thesis at Rutgers University, as an important turning point, and now, for quite some years, graphic medicine, where writing in images has become mainstream. It is in this context that one must understand the publication with a well-respected university press, that of MIT, of a graphic novel, more specifically of a graphic novel quite unlike the many books on science and scientist that are flooding the comics and graphic novel market.

The major distinctive feature of The Phantom Scientist is the fact that it is a work of fiction. Biopics of scientists of all disciplines and periods are now well represented in the catalogues of all comics publishers, and some of them have proven highly successful, such as Logicomix, featuring Bertrand Russell and the foundational quest in mathematics (first released in Greek 2008; English edition, 2009). But in The Phantom Scientist, there are no heroes; the characters are ordinary people, nearly anonymous researchers, gathered for strange experiments on systems theory and the development of new forms of algorithmic procedures. They are invited one after another, in an environment that at first sight looks like the ideal research institute (money is not an issue!), but that for the newcomer with whom the story unfolds rapidly proves to be total dystopia. The fiction, moreover, is never a didactic one, a characteristic that too often harms nonfiction science biopics. We are not visiting some secret research center like the one where Tintin's Professor Calculus explains over several pages to a lay audience the technology of a spaceship that is about to be launched to the moon (see Destination Moon, first serialized in 1950). Here, the reader follows various scientists, each of them a specialist in their own field and not necessarily understanding what the others are doing. But the story, which certainly triggers the reader's imagination and desire to understand, never tries to make totally clear the details of the research going on at the institute. In addition, the scientific layer of the fictional story is masterfully interwoven into a larger plot where scientific research and daily life intersect in many ways, for instance through the struggle of a researcher elaborating an algorithm capable of predicting the future, including the death of some of those present at the institute. The Phantom Scientist does not project scientists