L'Appel de l'espace

What's going on out there? Will Eisner uses the idea of extraterrestrial contact to explore the weird happenings right here at home in Life on Another Planet. Serialized in the late 1970s and collected in the graphic-novel form that Eisner both invented and perfected, the story follows scientists, politicians, spies, and nobodies as they struggle to reach their own goals amidst this international crisis. The author paints his characters with broad strokes, and though his science is a little off base and his political satire dated, the novel still mines that same vein of deep truths that Eisner can find running through any subject. --Rob Lightner