Einstein Graphic Novel by Corinne Maier and Anne Simon, Page by Page

Einstein’s Brilliant and Unusual Life, in a Graphic Novel

Einstein is a graphic biography written by Corinne Maier and drawn by Anne Simon, published in English by the London comics house Nobrow in 2016. It tells Albert Einstein’s life (1879–1955) in his own imagined voice, looking back from old age, and mixes the physics with the messier private story: his first marriage, his lost daughter, his regrets about the bomb and his long campaign for peace. It is the third of the pair’s illustrated lives of modern thinkers, after Freud (2013) and Marx (2014), and the three were later collected as Marx, Freud, Einstein: Heroes of the Mind (2017).

Maier, born in Geneva in 1963, is a psychoanalyst, economist and writer best known for Bonjour paresse (Hello Laziness), her 2004 send-up of French corporate life. That background shows: the book is less a hero story than a portrait of a brilliant, funny and sometimes selfish man. Simon’s drawings are loose and cartoonish, with a palette of mustard yellow, orange and deep blue, and she is especially good at turning abstract ideas such as curved space-time into images. The pages below follow the book’s path from childhood to the peace movement, with notes on the history behind each scene. You can find the book from Nobrow’s Einstein or through your public library.

A legend and his contradictions

The book opens with a cosmic memorial: a plaque reading “Here lived Albert Einstein” planted on a planet, while several versions of Einstein float through space. It sets the tone for a story told by the scientist himself, who now belongs to the whole universe. The image also hints at the many Einsteins the public has invented since his death in 1955.

At a seminar on “Einstein and his legacy”, experts shout competing labels at the old man: genius, traitor, communist, pacifist, womaniser, father of the atomic bomb, Zionist, plagiarist. Some of these are fair, some are half-truths and some are plainly wrong; he did not build the bomb, for example. The page ends with Einstein fleeing his admirers, which captures how uncomfortable he found celebrity.

A full-page forest scene illustrates Einstein’s belief that everything, from insects to stars, is shaped by forces beyond our control. He was a determinist who admired Spinoza’s idea of an orderly universe. That conviction later made him uneasy with quantum theory’s randomness.

Mileva Marić and the early years

In Zurich, the young Einstein meets Mileva Marić, a Serbian student from Austria-Hungary who was the only woman in her group of six on the physics and mathematics teaching course at the Federal Polytechnic. The panels show their shared outsider status and the spark between them. Einstein, who had renounced his German citizenship, applies for Swiss nationality, which he received in 1901.

The couple work on physics together, with Mileva offering help with calculations as Einstein dreams of riding a light wave. How much she contributed to his early work is still debated: many historians see her as a supportive partner, while others think ideas may have developed between them. The book leans towards giving her real credit, which is worth reading as an interpretation rather than settled fact.

Einstein’s mother explodes at the news that he wants to marry Mileva, and the page lists the family’s objections, including that Mileva was Serbian, older and not Jewish. She was born in December 1875, more than three years before Albert. The pair married in Bern in 1903 regardless, after the birth of their first daughter, Lieserl, whose fate is unknown.

1905: the miracle year and special relativity

Working as a clerk at the Swiss patent office in Bern, Einstein published four landmark papers in the journal Annalen der Physik in 1905. They covered the photoelectric effect (light behaving as particles), Brownian motion (strong evidence that atoms exist), special relativity and the equivalence of mass and energy. Simon draws the year as a storm of paper and ideas.

The special theory of relativity is explained with stretchy clocks and a rocket: time and space are not absolute, and a fast-moving traveller ages more slowly than someone left on Earth. The effect is tiny at everyday speeds, which is why we do not notice it. GPS satellites, though, must correct for relativity to give accurate positions.

The only absolute in Einstein’s theory is the speed of light, about 300,000 kilometres per second, which nothing can exceed. The page then introduces his short follow-up paper, the “postscript” that led to the most famous equation in physics. Simple drawings show mass and energy as two forms of the same thing.

E = mc² is explained with the Sun, which loses mass as it pours out energy as light. The page closes with a pun: in German, “ein Stein” means “a stone”, and even a stone holds an enormous amount of energy. It is a neat example of the book’s mix of jokes and real teaching.

The equation showed that a tiny amount of mass could release a vast amount of energy, which nuclear fission later made real. A footnote names the scientists who developed nuclear physics, including Joliot-Curie, Fermi, Meitner and Szilárd, and Einstein, drawn as a sorcerer’s apprentice, broods over the atomic bomb. The closing line about wishing he had become a cobbler echoes a remark often attributed to him about becoming a watchmaker; its exact wording is uncertain.

General relativity and the 1919 eclipse

Ten years after special relativity, Einstein completed his general theory in 1915, extending his ideas from the very small to planets and galaxies. Gravity, he proposed, is not a force pulling across space but the curving of space-time by mass. Simon shows planets resting in a sagging grid, an image used by physics teachers everywhere.

This double-page spread turns space-time into a twisting ribbon through the cosmos, with tiny Einsteins skateboarding along it. The drawing is not a diagram, but it gets across how strange the new geometry was. It is one of the book’s most memorable images.

The theory was dramatically confirmed in 1919, when Arthur Eddington’s expedition measured starlight bending around the Sun during a solar eclipse. The news made Einstein world-famous almost overnight. The page also notes later ideas that grew from his work, including the Big Bang, black holes and, more loosely, string theory.

Here an older Einstein admits his mistakes. He added a “cosmological constant” to his equations during the First World War to keep the universe static, and is said to have called it his biggest blunder after the universe was found to be expanding; that remark is known mainly through the physicist George Gamow. The page also touches on his rejection of quantum randomness, symbolised by dice, and his 1939 letter to President Roosevelt urging the United States to research atomic weapons, which he later said he regretted signing.

The campaigner for peace

The final pages follow Einstein into the Cold War, where he spent his last years campaigning against nuclear weapons and for a world government. Bertrand Russell appears among the speakers, and days before his death in April 1955 Einstein signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto warning of nuclear war. The book also mentions his civil rights work in Princeton, where he called racism America’s worst disease.

Is the book worth reading?

For teenagers and adults who want a quick, lively introduction to Einstein, it is an easy recommendation. The physics is explained carefully without equations beyond E = mc², and the private story is told honestly, including his treatment of Mileva and his absence from his children’s lives. A few points are simplified: Einstein’s 1921 Nobel Prize, for instance, was awarded for the photoelectric effect, not relativity, and some quotes put in his mouth are paraphrases. Readers who want depth can follow it with a full biography or the free Digital Einstein Papers.

Younger children may prefer On a Beam of Light, Jennifer Berne’s picture-book life of Einstein. And if this book appeals, Maier and Simon’s Freud and Marx use the same approach on two other thinkers who shaped the modern world. The book is available as Einstein by Corinne Maier and Anne Simon.

Illustrations courtesy of Nobrow.

Sources: Wikipedia: Corinne Maier; Wikipedia: Albert Einstein; Wikipedia: Mileva Marić; Wikipedia: Lieserl Einstein; first featured by Maria Popova at Brain Pickings.

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