Leland Myrick is the Ignatz Award– and Harvey Award–nominated author and illustrator of The Sweet Collection, Bright Elegy, Missouri Boy, and illustrator of the New York Times–bestseller Feynman, a collaboration with Jim Ottaviani. He has written and illustrated work for Dark Horse Comics, GQ Japan, Vogue Russia, and the Flight series. Jim Ottaviani is a New York Times–bestselling author. Ottaviani and Myrick’s Hawking (First Second), is an illustrated biography of Stephen Hawking, one of the most important scientists of our time. As they tell it, from his early days at the St Albans School and Oxford, Stephen Hawking’s brilliance and good humor were obvious to everyone he met. Then, at twenty-one, he was diagnosed with ALS, a degenerative neuromuscular disease. Though the disease weakened his muscles and limited his ability to move and speak, it did nothing to limit his mind. After being told he had only a few years to live, he went on to do groundbreaking work in cosmology and theoretical physics for decades, bringing his intimate understanding of the universe to the public in his 1988 bestseller, A Brief History of Time. He also established himself as a pop-culture icon by playing himself on shows like Star Trek, The Simpsons, and The Big Bang Theory, and becoming an outspoken advocate for disability rights. Publishers Weekly celebrated Hawking: “This smart and wondrously exploratory scientific biography reveals as much about black holes as the man who explored them.”
