BOMB (GRAPHIC NOVEL)

A graphic version, losing none of the original’s high drama, of Sheinkin’s 2012 award-winning account of the supposedly secret Manhattan Project.

It’s a big story, but the author expertly juggles multiple plotlines to tell a coherent tale at breakneck speed, with all the significant encounters, quotes, and technological breakthroughs intact and a prose afterword to wrap up loose ends. Using a mix of emotionally intense face-to-face exchanges and silent reaction shots in his realistically drawn scenes, Bertozzi creates a properly cinematic flow as he portrays, on the one hand, the development and cataclysmic use of the first two atomic bombs and, on the other, how the Manhattan Project’s secrets were collected and transported from Los Alamos to the Soviets. Two figures stand out in particular from the teeming cast (which is not quite all-male, as several women played important roles on both sides): Harry Gold, a reluctant courier whose prominence is boosted here by several newly added scenes, and Robert Oppenheimer, who headed up the project’s research team and whose appalled recollection of a line from the Bhagavad-Gita in the wake of the Trinity test explosion—“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”—remains the Atomic Age’s most powerful and (probably) prophetic motto.

A heady whirl of science and spycraft made even more immediate (and frightening) by strong visuals.