You know, for my money, they didn't make General Leslie Groves look enough like Paul Newman.

You've seen that flick, right? Fat Man and Little Boy? Howlin' Mad Murdock and Fast Eddie Felson team up to make a great big hole in the desert and talk about how they shouldn't be doing this, like giggling and guilty illicit lovers at a secret rendezvous, and then there's a big flash, and then the movie just ends? That one.

That was the sum total of my knowledge of the Manhattan Project before I read Fallout.

Now, I'm not an uneducated guy. I went to school. I took the history classes, the political science discussions about nuclear war and the policies of mutually assured destruction. I read the books and the essays and the news stories and the stacks of spiral-bound copies they gave us. It's just that, in all that time we talked about the bomb, we never talked about its father - or fathers, if we're going to be correct and give credit and blame where they are appropriately due. I didn't have a clue whose idea it had all been, or why the United States went ahead with a project that seemed, in retrospect, to be the result of a rather monstrous idea. And I didn't know the name of the man whose daydreaming led a bunch of scientists to accomplish what might be the most significant scientific achievement of the Twentieth Century.

Jim Ottaviani and his team of artists set me straight.

Fun fact I learned Number One: It might be a misnomer to refer to J. Robert Oppenheimer as the "Father of the Atomic Bomb." Certainly he was the man who shepherded the Manhattan Project along, and was absolutely and unequivocally instrumental in its final success, but the man whose brain first turned to the destructive power that splitting the atom might unleash was Leo Szilard, a German-born physicist. Living in London in 1933, Szilard began to ponder the possibility of splitting the atom and realized that such a feat might unleash a tremendous amount of force - force that he feared the Nazis might use to help them win the war.

Fun fact I learned Number Two: the scientists working on the Manhattan Project understood very well what they were getting into, and what the likely outcome of their efforts would be. The popular conception of the project paints the scientists as workaholics who didn't consider the consequences of their actions until it was too late to stop it, but Ottaviani reveals that even before the work began, the scientists involved were concerned about the purposes and uses of any device they might build. It's as if they were forced to make a devil's choice: abandon the project and see the U.S. government push it forward anyway with someone else, or work on a device that, in Oppenheimer's words, "has no military significance" and "is not a weapon which is useful in war." "Leo, have you looked around you?" Oppenheimer wonders - "Do you think we could stop this even if we wanted to?!"

It's that kind of ominous inevitability that propels much of Fallout, really. It's a book about the creation of a monster and the eventual downfall of the men who brought it into being. As the story moves along, you keep wishing, hoping that they won't succeed, that they won't be able to reach their preordained conclusion, that they'll fail - and then the flash at Trinity on July 16, 1945 ends that hope in a ball of fire. (And what a scene, too - Jeff Parker's stark black and white figures, previously drowned in thick black panel borders and inky shadows, stand revealed in borderless panels and white space as Janine Johnston's murky greywashed Vishnu towers over Oppenheimer.)

Where most accounts of the Manhattan Project might end with that detonation, Fallout remains fascinating beyond the successful Trinity test as it traces the careers of the men, particularly Oppenheimer, who gave birth to the bomb. These were, in all likelihood, the finest minds of their time; they gave the United States the boost it would need to become the world's first great superpower, and in return the American government gave them derision, suspicion, and investigation. Witness how the United States effectively turned its back on Oppenheimer, a man who had been entrusted with the greatest of secret projects and had helped to achieve the impossible. Apparently unable to fully reconcile his beliefs on the wisdom of the atomic bomb with the realities of national security and military policy, Oppenheimer is left out in the cold when his security clearance is not renewed by the Atomic Energy Commission (an agency that likely would not have existed without Oppenheimer's efforts.) Oppenheimer, like the rest of his fellow scientists, took up an impossible task, only to discover years later that it was thankless, as well.

One might think that a book like Fallout would not succeed with more than one artist, let alone five separate pencillers. However, the difference in styles fuels the atmosphere of each chapter; Janine Johnston's dreamlike "Birth" takes place in the late '30s and seems far from the angular urgency of Vince Locke's war-era "School", just as Steve Lieber's boxy and paranoid "Death" chapter shows us an Oppenheimer trapped by accusations of communist leanings. Each chapter is unique, yet the book has a strong sense of continuity, despite the drastic differences in styles, thanks to Ottaviani's thorough research and strong characterization. While some of the scientists and their opinions begin to run together after a while, particularly in "School" and "Work", Ottaviani does a marvelous job of streamlining the story, always reminding us that the book is really about Oppenheimer and Szilard and Groves, the true fathers of this monstrous, destructive child.

It's an absolutely riveting account of one of the most fascinating periods in American and world scientific, political, and military history. It manages to capture the excitement and wonder of scientific curiosity and thoroughly mix it up with the wordless dread of an inevitable, tragic disaster. Fallout is, in short, one of the best books I have read in the last year, and it ought to be one of yours, as well.

FALLOUT is available through your local comic shop using the following Diamond order code: STAR14735