By Don Brown
A graphic-novel history of how humans learned to build rockets, all the way from ancient Chinese fireworks to the footprints on the moon.
Narrated by a real 1913 daredevil, this comic tells the whole tangled story of how we got to the moon: Chinese rockets, the 'rockets' red glare' of the War of 1812, a lonely dreamer named Robert Goddard everyone laughed at, the Sputnik shock, and then the Apollo program's climb to the lunar surface. Don Brown draws it all in loose, expressive watercolor and doesn't tidy up the hard parts, so a fact-hungry older child gets the real, complicated version of a story they think they already know.
It's the rung where a space-obsessed child gets the grown-up truth in a form they'll actually devour. The comic panels pull a fluent reader through real history fast, and Brown respects them enough to include the parts other children' books skip, which makes it feel like the honest, whole story rather than the poster version. For a child who has read the rocket picture books and wants the real how-and-why, this delivers it without turning into a textbook.