Author: Janine Johnston, Jeffrey Jones, Chris Kemple, Jim Ottaviani
Publisher: G.T. Labs
Rating: WARTY!
This graphic novel is a pictorial representation of events leading up to the development of the atomic bomb which was used to almost literally erase the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 and (along with the second bomb on Nagasaki) precipitate the end of World War Two. The bomb slaughtered some sixty thousand people, including twenty thousand Japanese troops, and it destroyed a munitions factory. That seems like a huge number of deaths and it is horrific without a doubt, but more destruction was rained down during Operation Meetinghouse, when the US napalmed helpless civilians in Tokyo, some one hundred thousand people died, and Tokyo was all but leveled; however, nothing has ever been built that's as fearful, as iconic, or as singularly destructive and pernicious as an atomic bomb.
This novel describes the work of the scientists who finally figured out how to bring uranium to critical mass so that it set off a chain reaction and so graphically demonstrated the immensely powerful principle of E=mc². The work began long before it was decided to use the bomb, and it was driven not by a desire to defeat Japan, but out of fear that the Nazis would develop such a weapon.
The black & white artwork is not that great, quite frankly. It's very inconsistent since it’s apparently drawn by more than one artist, and the story, believe it or not, is rather boring. How you can make a story like this boring is a mystery to me, but I had a bit of a time of it in reading this. I gave up about two-thirds or three-quarters the way through where the format changed to one featuring much more more text and a lot less imagery, in some sort of epilogue, which lost my interest completely.
The novel is quite technical in parts, which was interesting to me, but it was also boring to read an almost endless account of some aspects of the story, while other topics flashed by with barely a mention. For example, the obsession with recording the tediously on-going need to build-up a graphite barrier around the core of the nuclear reaction in early testing, was weird and pointless! Depict it and move on already! There also seemed to be some confusion about the atomic number of Plutonium - with 94 being confused with 49. Plutonium had no name back then, and was known only as a number. I'm not a physicist, but there is, trust me, a huge difference between Indium and Plutonium!
So, in short, I can’t recommend this graphic novel.
