The Bomb: The Weapon That Changed the World

This exhaustively detailed account of the race to build the first nuclear weapons opens in 1933 with Hungarian Jewish scientist Leo Szilard’s theory of the nuclear chain reaction and ends with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. Alcante (the Pandora’s Box series), Bollée (London Inferno), and Rodier (the Superman series) highlight the key players in the various countries attempting to produce a usable weapon. In 1939, both Nazi Germany and the United States form working groups of scientists to tackle the problem, followed quickly by the United Kingdom, the U.S.S.R., and Japan. The sprawling cast includes Leslie Groves, the volatile U.S. Army officer overseeing the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.Mex.; the eccentric physicist Robert Oppenheimer; and Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs, as well as more unexpected figures, including anonymous and unwilling Black American test subjects (injected with plutonium) and a father in Hiroshima. Much space gets devoted to dense scientific debates, but heightened action sequences—British agents sabotaging Nazi efforts in Norway, kamikaze pilots preparing for battle—supply tension. The accomplished and realistic black-and-white comics art excels at capturing consternation in angry faces—and the sections narrated ominously by uranium itself are a successful flourish. History buffs should take a look. (July)