An illustrated take on a horrific act of modern warfare

The writers and artist of a new graphic novel achieve neutrality on a controversial historic event

IN1981, when Didier Alcante was a young boy, he traveled from his home in Belgium to Japan to visit his best friend, Kazuo. There, while touring the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Alcante came upon the exhibition of hitokage no ishi, known in English as the Human Shadow Etched in Stone, the Blast Shadow, or the Shadow of Death.

Hitokage no ishi represents the residue of a human being that on August 6, 1945, was set into stairsteps that originally led to Sumitomo Bank’s main entrance, in the heart of the city. “It was like seeing a ghost,” the Belgian comics writer told Pasatiempo over Zoom. “There had been a human there. And then the bomb pulverized him. Just like that.”

No one knows for sure whose shadow this may have been. In the awardwinning graphic novel La Bombe, however, Alcante and his two coauthors — writer Jean-frédéric Bollée and illustrator Denis Rodier — depict the victim as a man. They also give him a name: Naoki Morimoto.

La Bombe, whose first English translation — The Bomb: The Weapon That Changed the World — was released in the U.S. on July 11, tells the story of the most disastrous weapon ever invented. It starts with the Big Bang and ends with the bombing of Hiroshima. It sifts through centuries and countries, states, cities, and towns: from Germany, Italy, Norway, and the USSR, to New Mexico, Tinian Island, and ultimately Japan.

Whoever he may have been in real life, Naoki Morimoto stood no chance that summer morning on the steps of the Sumitomo Bank. When the Enola Gay dropped Little Boy at 8:15 a.m. local time on August 6, 1945, Naoki was sitting some 284 yards from ground zero, where the temperature is thought to have been, right after the explosion, 3,000 to 4,000 degrees Celsius (5,432 to 7,232 degrees Fahrenheit).

Now that he’s in his early 50s, Alcante knows his history and understands Japanese imperialism and what may well have led the American government to authorize such an attack on Japan.

But his initial feelings and opinion of the bomb from his 1981 experience to Hiroshima remain. And what Alcante cannot understand is this: That human beings dropped an atomic bomb (two, actually), on other human beings. On civilians. On children.

By the time Alcante decided to tackle the history of the atomic bomb in 2015 in graphic novel form, he had already authored more than 60 graphic novels on different topics. But he knew this would be different — just researching it would be enormous. It’d take years to write it, never mind illustrate it. Alcante chose his two creative partners both for their respective talents and also for their artistic commitment to the work ahead — and to the telling of the history of the atomic bomb as neutrally as possible.

Laurent-frédéric Bollée (LF Bollée), Alcante’s writing partner, is a former French journalist turned graphic novel writer. Just before Alcante contacted him about his new project, Bollée had copublished Terra Australis ,a massive, 500-page masterpiece about the history of Australia. In French and Belgian graphic novel terms, that’s nearly 11 times the length of a regular book.

Denis Rodier, on the other hand, is a French Canadian illustrator who works for the likes of Marvel Comics and DC Comics. His portfolio includes Wonder Woman and Captain America. It is, however, Rodier’s camera-like visual sensibility and work ethic that excited Alcante the most. Indeed, by 2015, Rodier had gained a sensational creative stamina by working for 10 years straight on the Superman series.

From the very beginning of the project, Alcante, Bollée, and Rodier intended The Bomb to be apolitical, nonpropagandist, nonjudgmental, and nonsensationalist. They consulted with scientists and historians and visited Hiroshima, too, on the 75th anniversary of the bombing. There, their guide and interpreter, Seiji Nakahara, presented them to his mother, a Hiroshima orphan who had been evacuated with other children and teenagers from the city on August 5, 1945. Akiko Nakahara, with her son’s help, guided Bollée, Alcante, and Rodier in reconstructing, detail by detail, Hiroshima before the bomb.

Despite their mutual experience during their visit to Hiroshima, neither of the three artists shares the same views on the atomic bomb and its military use, Alcante told me.

“The morality of the bomb is extremely complex,” Rodier says during the virtual interview from his studio in Québec, where he spent 50 to 55 hours per week over four years drawing The Bomb. “It is just as complex as climate change and having to decide between nuclear energy or coal.”

Alcante, Bollée, and Rodier wanted to narrate facts, not opinions of facts, and let their readers decide for themselves. They wanted us to ask ourselves, as Rodier says, “What would I have done in 1945? What would I have felt about the bomb then?”

For this very reason, and unlike the upcoming Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer (opening July 21), the three authors of The Bomb chose not to make any scientist, military, or politician into a hero or a villain — not Oppenheimer, not Fermi, not Groves, not Truman, and not Einstein.

Instead, they made sure to give central stage to as many of those involved as possible, including nuclear physicists in the U.S. who opposed the military use of the bomb. One such scientist was Leo Szilard, the Manhattan Project’s most outspoken objector of conscience and whose campaign to demonstrate the bomb to the Japanese rather than dropping it on their cities ultimately failed. (Now, see if you meet Leo Szilard in Christopher Nolan’s film.)

To achieve this narrative and political neutrality — a refreshing take on such a controversial topic, especially in the U.S. where the side of the victor is often the only side — the three artists noted in their interviews the need to constantly prendre du recul. In French, the phrase means “to take a step back so as to see something in the most objective way possible.”

That didn’t mean they didn’t find writing and illustrating The Bomb emotionally difficult. By the time the French version came out in late 2020, they were all exhausted. Rodier had been especially nervous about drawing the victims in Hiroshima. He didn’t want to sensationalize their suffering or undercut it either. “I wanted to respect them.” Alcante, who wrote this particular scene, found it just as difficult.

Ivanka T. Hahnenberger, the English translator of The Bomb, found the work of translating this particular graphic novel all the more emotionally and technically challenging. She relied heavily on her mother, Elowyn Castle, whose husband (Ivanka’s father) had been a nuclear physicist. Both Hahnenberger and Castle worked with science experts to ensure that their translation was not just accurate linguistically but also scientifically.

Hahnenberger knew the history of the atomic bomb well before she agreed to translate The Bomb. She read the French version of the graphic novel, too, but translating it affected her more than she had expected. As a reader, you process each historical fact one speech bubble at a time. It’s easier to swallow, to move on from. But from her office in London, she notes the experience was different in her role: “As a translator, though, you reach the horror word by word.”

GRAPHIC NOVEL THE BOMB: THE WEAPON THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Didier Alcante, Laurent-frédéric Bollée, and Denis Rodier, translated from French by Ivanka T. Hahnenberger, in collaboration with Elowyn Castle; Abrams Comics; 464 pages; $29.99