Artist Jon J Muth has a long and impressive resume to his name. The winner of, among many other prizes, the Eisner Award, he’s illustrated a volume of Neil Gaiman’s seminal Sandman series, produced comics for powerhouses Marvel and DC Comics, and created critically acclaimed paintings. For the past two decades, his prolific output has primarily consisted of children’s book illustrations, a side effect, he says, of fatherhood. And while this shift led him to the place where he feels “truly at home,” it also meant moving away from a story he’d long been trying to tell—or so he thought.

In junior high school, Muth discovered a passion for reading science fiction, but there was one book that stood out from the rest: Solaris by Polish author Stanislaw Lem. “Where the story went, and why, and the implications were so new to me,” Muth remembers. “I’ve always been drawn to artists whose work goes out beyond the edge of the page, and Solaris sort of upset my apple cart.”

Lem was writing fabulous sagas of space exploration long before man’s first foray beyond Earth’s atmosphere. But despite the stories’ being set so far outside the bounds of reality, they remain grounded—not only in technological terms, incorporating scientific advances upon which Lem kept assiduously up to date, but also in humanity. It was that latter aspect that first got Muth thinking about the possibility of a collaboration.

“In the 1990s, comics were taking a cynical, postmodern, ironic stance,” Muth says, “and I felt somewhat lost.” He wanted to break free of what he felt to be an increasingly stifling atmosphere, and the nuanced and often humorous ways in which Lem explored sophisticated ideas seemed the perfect vehicle. So he wrote the author a letter, with markedly low expectations. But then, quite quickly, he got a reply.

“Once I caught my breath,” he says, “we corresponded about which of his books might make a good graphic novel.” After some back and forth, they arrived at “The Seventh Voyage,” a 1957 story from Lem’s The Star Diaries. It was the book that introduced readers to Ijon Tichy, a lovable, befuddled character who would reappear in Lem’s writing periodically throughout the decades. But then, parenthood arrived, and Muth’s career took a turn toward children’s books. It wasn’t until many years had passed, and Lem himself had died (in 2006), that Muth was finally given the chance to see the project through after being asked to create something for Scholastic’s Graphix imprint. “It was a perfect fit at the right time,” he says, simply.

Tichy’s adventures in The Seventh Voyage are extremely varied. “But most of them are funny or absurd,” Muth explains, “and they all poke fun at humanity’s foibles.” Muth notes that The Seventh Voyage lends itself well to the graphic format. “The rhythm and pacing and verbosity were deliberate and frustrating. Lem didn’t just describe it; as a reader you really go through it.” (The English translation is by Michael Kandel.)

The journey Muth and Lem take the reader on is a harrowing one, and it’s entirely Tichy’s fault. As he travels alone through space in a broken spacecraft, a series of gravitational vortices bend time, causing future and past versions of himself to appear and disappear. While the extra hands—his own—should make repairing the ship easier, he just keeps getting in his own way. Time and technology are in a constant state of flux in this beautifully illustrated and absurd story—it is, after all, a 2019 adaptation of a 1957 story set in the year 2319—and the focus on an individual with traits so immediately recognizable is what has allowed Tichy to remain relevant for so long. In fact, that was one of the biggest takeaways for Muth as he worked through the process of bringing the story to life.

“As I was doing the book, I would read the news or see some current information on the internet, and it occurred to me, this is just like the gravitational vortices Ijon Tichy is going through,” Muth reflects. “A ridiculous universe throwing unfathomable circumstances at us—and we watch in horror as history repeats itself over and over and over.”

James Feder is a New York–born, Scottish-educated writer based in Tel Aviv.