The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

The Three-Body Problem

What's It About? 

Amid China's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, a covert military project establishes contact with Trisolaris, an alien planet on the brink of destruction. This sets into motion the Trisolarans' long and menacing journey to invade Earth. Meanwhile, a secret society is formed by the world's elite, broken into factions with differing motivations for aiding in the Trisolaran invasion―from saving the lives of their descendants to accelerating the destruction of humanity. Decades later, a group of scientists and a cunning detective investigate a series of mysterious suicides, leading to the discovery of this Earth-Trisolaran Organization. Humanity's battle against its greatest threat has begun...

The Three-Body Problem has art by Xu DongCai, an original story by Cixin Liu, English translation by Xiao, and edited by Jin Cai, Twilight Lu, and Silver. This volume was lettered by Bianca Pistillo. Published by Yen Press (October 22, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

Despite the author's questionable political beliefs (and this warning should be lit up in neon lights), I read the novel due to the hype leading up to its Netflix series. Having read the whole book, I still had trouble following this comic. It's an intense, scholarly story with its basis in science and math: almost too cerebral for this visual form. The titular “Three-Body Problem,” a virtual reality game based on a set of real mathematical equations, is only addressed in passing by the time this volume is over. I would have been completely lost if I hadn't read the book.

Look up a synopsis of The Three-Body Problem and you'll get something like “a sci-fi thriller set against the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” But the relatively slower and less information-dense format of comics means that we have hardly scratched the surface of any of this, much less plot points that constitute “thrilling.” Our only brush with the virtual reality game is when a scientist is shown wearing a special (and sexy) suit. There is no indication of what the game entails, or why all these scientists are hooked on it. I enjoyed seeing my favorite character, the brash and callous Da Shi, in cartoon form, but he was shown sitting in darkened rooms: hardly the most riveting material for a comic book. That's most of the volume: a hyper-realistically rendered group of police, members of the military, and researchers sitting in the shadows, doing a mental back and forth as they try to figure out what's going on. In the book, this is treated as a lead-in to the meat of the story, but here it's all we get.

If I wasn't familiar with the material, I would have been completely bamboozled by the preview for volume two, which is about a strange race of people who can fully dehydrate their bodies. Relax, newbies: this is a mechanic of the virtual reality game, and where the story gets interesting. This is all a long-winded way to say that this is far from a useful entry point into The Three-Body Problem. And while I'm at it, I feel the same about the Netflix series. This is such hard science fiction that efforts to simplify the story have dumbed it down.

Chinese SF novelist Cixin Liu is currently having a bit of A Moment. The 2019 movie version of his The Wandering Earth short story became the most lucrative Chinese film ever made, and the 2024 Netflix adaptation of his Hugo award-winning novel The Three-Body Problem was widely praised by both critics and audiences. In China, the novel was also adapted as a 2023 live-action TV series (streaming in English on Peacock in the US and Amazon Prime in the UK), plus a 2023 TV CG animation. Now, via Yen Press, we have an English translation of the Chinese Comics adaptation.

The Three-Body Problem is a modern classic of SF literature – a complex, dense novel that explores not only theoretical physics but mankind's place in the universe. When a spate of unexplained suicides rocks the scientific community, police captain Shi Quiang investigates, coercing nanomaterial engineer Wang Miao to aid him. So unravels a disturbing conspiracy involving the secretive organization, The Frontiers of Science. Why has humanity somehow suddenly reached the apparent limit of theoretical physics? Is everything about the nature of reality a lie?

The problem with adapting such a dense work to comics is that, unless in the hands of an exceptionally skilled, imaginative artist, it can come across as… a bit flat. The Three-Body Problemcomic comprises mostly talking heads in dark, drab rooms. They were probably going for realism, but the murky color palette is so dull. Characters look like digitally painted anime screen-caps, while backgrounds are mundane and drab.

While the comic captures the sinister mystery sense established by the novel's opening chapters, I'd suggest reading the original and letting your mind paint the pictures. The Netflix TV adaptation takes huge liberties with plot and setting, changing entire characters, while maintaining a similar plot, whereas the Chinese TV version hews much closer to the novel. With the novel and other excellent adaptations so freely available, I'm not sure why you'd choose this comparatively sub-par version.

I read and enjoyed The Three-Body Problem novel, but I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get from a graphic novel adaptation of the story. In a foreword to the manhua, Cixin Liu speaks of the difficulty of conveying the author's imagination with words alone. I'm not sure that's as big a problem as they're making it out to be.

The art for Three-Body is serviceable, but it feels plain even with the art being in full color. Characters don't stand out, everything seems polished of all memorability or detail. It doesn't help that the story is rearranged from the novel; here, the manhua focuses on Wang Miao's introduction, while ignoring the many events that occurred in the 1960s. This adaptation is also dragged down by the sheer amount of text, with lots of those speech bubbles going on for too long. The result is a manga that only covers a few chapters of the first book.

This feels like a frustrating adaptation of The Three-Body Problem. Very little of the graphic novel format compliments the story, and the story itself is decompressed to the point of this first volume having frustratingly little of it. And the art, while serviceable, doesn't make up for this being so painfully slow. I can't fault The Three-Body Problem's manhua for any grievous error, but this does feel like the weakest method of enjoying the story. Mildly recommended, but maybe stick to the actual novel?