Can a comic book capture what it’s like to do math? 

That’s the book that Xavier and John Golden set out to write. Xavier is a high school art teacher who graduated from GVSU in 2023, and his father, Prof John Golden, has been haunting the math department since the last millennium.  While they wrote it together, Xavier also did the pencils, inks, colors and lettering.

AL, Logical began as an Honors College senior project, starting with a draft of nine pages. Then they planned the graphic novel and produced the first chapter. Finally a grant from the GVSU Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarship enabled them to finish the book and print a few copies.

Xavier shares the message of the story: “AL, Logical is ultimately about someone who learns that they can do new, challenging things. More specifically, it's about a student learning that she is, despite what she thinks at first, a math person. And that it's her curiosity and creativity that makes her a math person.” The fun in the story is that this happens in a mysterious extra-dimensional house with the ghost of a mathematician who also has some things to learn.

AL, Logical has been picked up by Natural Math Publishing; one of the reasons John and Xavier like this publisher is that there is a name-your-own-price pdf option, so the book is available to anyone that wants it.  In addition, the publisher helped them get a lot of great feedback from beta readers, which led to Xavier reworking the inks and color.  This spring they completed a successful Kickstarter campaign to help fund the publishing process moving forward. 

You can preorder a copy of AL, Logical.