I think, perhaps, that the most illustrative comic I can use to help shed some light on
GEB is the recently completed Planetary by Warren Ellis, John Cassaday and Laura Martin.

The series is nothing more or less than an in-medium history of the superhero comic book. It uses images and tropes that we are familiar with and twists them into some thing totally different- recognizable and at the same time totally new, not unlike Escher’s Metamorphosis II (which is figure 8 in GEB). It’s damn good story telling, but the main reason it works is because readers because the skill with which Warren Ellis self-references not only his own story but also his whole medium is mind blowing.

At its core, Planetary is about nothing if not strange loops- I count several in the description above- and Ellis’s interest in transhumanism gifts the stories with explicit examples of strange loops, one of the most interesting being how a such a loop could bring about the end of the universe, should a time machine ever be turned on.

Despite its inherent connection to GEB’s notion of strange loops, I actually bring Planetary up in this space for an entirely different reason. I want to bring Planetary into the conversation because, thematically, the series is about recognizing that the world is strange and wonderful and attempting to keep it that way. On pages 22-23, Hofstadter insists that what makes math interesting is “the quirky and the bizzarre.” Here, he makes a distinction not dissimilair from the one that Aristotle makes, in the Physics, between the projects of physis (nature) and techne (lets call this modern science). Aristotle sees the inquiry into the former as an inquiry to the essense of things, into what makes them wonderful and beautiful, etc. The latter, on the other hand, is not about inquiring into what is wonderful but instead about dissecting those wonderful things so that we might be able to explain them. It’s important, I think, to look at Hofstadter’s project in this light- this is an exploration, not a disscetion, and we can see this in the author’s sense of whimsy.

Ultimately, then, I suspect that GEB is nothing less than an inquiry into the good life, just like Planetary is about preserving and revealing it. That they both deal with strange loops, I think, is not a coincidence.