Jim Ottaviani's new science history graphic novel, T-Minus: The Race to the Moon, is a fast-paced, informative recounting of the events beginning with the launch of Sputnik, the first human-made satellite on Oct 4, 1957, to the first human landing on the moon on July 20, 1969.
I know Ottaviani's work through his much older book Dignifying Science: Stories About Women Scientists, which is one of my favorite comic history books, a vivid retelling of the lives of some of science's most inspiring women.
With T-Minus Ottaviani once again brings the human side of science to life, conveying the passion, the wonder, and the frustrations of the scientists and engineers who "fought" the space race on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Superbly researched, T-Minus never lets go of the story, but still finds many sneaky ways of inserting the hard data about the rockets, their capabilities, and the scientists who worked on them into the book.
Intended for young adults, this title was incredibly satisfying to me, an adult-adult (which is as it should be). I could also appreciate how a younger me would have revelled in the frequent sidebars giving diagrams and statistics for each rocket launched in the race, and both of us appreciated the lovely attention to the human details in the lives of the people in the story, like the cosmonaut whose father thinks "sitting on a rocket is no work for a grown man," the sheer wonder conveyed in the real-life words of the first people to do spacewalks, the Gulag-haunted Russian scientist Sergei Pavlovich's chronic (and eventually fatal) injuries from his prison term, and many other gracenotes.
As a history book or a diverting and inspiring story, T-Minus gets the job done.
- Grease Monkey: indie space-station comic collection – Boing Boing
- STATION: graphic novel locked-room mystery on the Int'l Space …
- Laika the space dog gets a statue – Boing Boing
- Laika the astro-dog tin toy from 1958 – Boing Boing
- Laika – graphic novel tells the sweet and sad story of the first …
- Cosmonauts urinating on a bus – Boing Boing
- Underpaid cosmonauts – Boing Boing
- Yuri's Night: spacemen branded me with Yuri Gagarin's head …
- Ham radio and space nerds tune in to NASA SuitSat on Saturday …
- Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 – Boing Boing
- Duct tape saved Apollo 17 moonbuggy, while on the moon. – Boing Boing
- Lockheed wins $4B NASA deal for "Apollo on steroids," Orion …
- HOWTO build an Apollo Guidance Computer – Boing Boing
- Playboy Playmates pranked into Apollo 12 mission checklists …
- Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell's Message Board – Boing Boing
- Lunar junk – Boing Boing
- Images from the dawn of the Apollo program – Boing Boing