T - Minus the race to the moon

This week, in addition to some fine superhero comics, saw the release of some big release original graphic novels. One of these was T - Minus the race to the moon, written by Jim Ottaviani and drawn by Zander and Kevin Cannon, published by Simon & Schuster, with 125 pages for only $12.99.

On the publisher information page there's a notation that T - Minus a race to the moon is a work of historical fiction, but the only fictional part of this graphic novel is some of the dialogue (because everything that was said by the various people involved wasn't recorded of course) and some of the characters are composites as there were too many people involved in making the landing on the moon possible to be included (as stated in the end liner notes, over 400,000 men and women worked on the Apollo, Gemini, and Mercury missions!). I've got to think that it would be pretty difficult to produce any account of the U.S. goal to land on the moon before the 1960's closed (and before the Russians) that isn't exciting and the creative team of T - Minus manages to combine a narrative structure that isn't weighed down by the wealth of historical data that is also presented. I think T - Minus will be entertaining / informative to both those largely unfamiliar with the details of this historic event and those who've actually witnessed some of the actual events in some way as they were taking place (or have read / watched movies about the road to the U.S. 1969 moon landing). While reading T - Minus, I was reminded how amazing early space (and moon) exploration was in the days before computers had the processing powers they have today and just how many variables there were (and people) in making this happen.