A rich, full-color graphic exploration of our journey to the moon and a celebration of scientific achievement

On July 20, 1969, something extraordinary happened, something civilizations had dreamed of for centuries: humans walked on the moon. Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Moonbound is the story behind those first steps.

It begins with the tense, suspense-filled descent of the spidery Lunar Module, which transported Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the moon; the narrative offers a close-up view of the action. Then the story splits to an examination of the history of man’s fascination with space—from the earliest observers of the moon to the clear-eyed descriptions recorded by such visionaries as Galileo—and continues into the modern era, from Nazi atrocities and Soviet intrigues to square-jawed astronauts and a revolving cast of space-age dreamers. The narrative returns to July 20, 1969, the moment when our heroes made their historic moon walk, and finally moves on to the Space Shuttle program, the cosmic ambitions of deep-space probes, and the aspirations of companies like SpaceX.

The story of space has always been about the conflict of imagination versus reality, of dreams versus politics. Publishing in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing, Moonbound revisits this classic story in a new way, as a graphic history.

Jonathan Fetter-Vorm is an author and illustrator. His first book, Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb, was selected by the American Library Association as a Great Graphic Novel for Teens in 2013. His Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War, coauthored with the historian Ari Kelman, was published in May 2015. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, and Guernica. Fetter-Vorm lives with his wife in Montana.