"Hawking," by Jim Ottaviani, illustrated by Leland Myrick. (First Second, $29.99.)
Having tackled towering intellects such as Dian Fossey, Alan Turing and Richard Feynman, the great Jim Ottaviani turns to the late Stephen Hawking. The intellectually thrilling result does not disappoint.
Reuniting with his Feynman illustrator, Leland Myrick, Ottaviani tells Hawking's story from his subject's point of view, allowing for a more intimate rendering. He ticks through the major signposts of Hawking's life, from being an arrogantly brilliant but somewhat lazy Cambridge man ("only 'grey men' applied themselves, you see"), to marrying his first wife, Jane, the painfully slow realization of his degenerative neuromuscular disease ALS, to writing his bestselling "A Brief History of Time."
Ottaviani's dense but highly readable account braids the implacable advance of Hawking's ALS with his determination to not let his impaired body imprison his beautiful mind. Stops along the way provide helpful side notes on subjects such as relativity to ease understanding of the awesomely brain-twisting reality screws that the book indulges. All of this brightly illustrates the universe-spanning leaps Hawking's mind took even while his body was confined to a motorized wheelchair and his voice replicated via computer monotone. This might be an illustrated biography, but it's no children's book.
"Hawking" is fortunately narrated in the cheeky manner its subject preferred. Addressing fears that the CERN collider would create black holes (a specialty of his), Hawking assures the audience they are safe: "If you are reading this, then my colleagues and I were right." Ottaviani astutely remembers that Hawking also loved Monty Python and didn't mind taking the odd "Star Trek" cameo. Such details help humanize a man too often remembered for what he did and not who he was.
"They Called Us Enemy," by George Takei, Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott, illustrated by Harmony Becker. (Top Shelf, $19.99.)
Even though they have (finally) been included in school textbooks, the facts contained in "Star Trek" actor George Takei's spare and powerful wartime graphic memoir "They Called Us Enemy" are no less appalling for being widely known.
In an act of stunningly blasé racism, on Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the military to create "exclusion areas" from which it could deport any civilians it wished. As Takei notes, it "quickly became obvious" that meant Japanese-Americans. One frame vibrating with modern resonance illustrates the "No Japs" war-fever hysteria as a crowd chanting, "Lock them up!"
