Steve Jobs the Comic Book Hero: An Early Look

PCWorld managed to snag previews of “Steve Jobs: Co-Founder of Apple,” a comic book portrayal of the life of the irascible genius behind the Mac and iPhone in drawings, from his birth to modern day. Here’s a look at the images.

The $3.99 book is published by Bluewater and written by CW Cooke, drawn by Chris Schmidt, and has cover art by Joe Phillips, who has worked on DC comic titles.

Bluewater says these are a work-in-progress and that the pages have not yet been colored or had speech bubbles put in, but here you can see an extremely young Steve Jobs.

The 32-page comic book will be published in August.

“[Jobs has] been called an innovator, risk-taker, a visionary and a genius. He’s also been called unscrupulous, an egomaniac and a corporate pirate. Both sides of this complex personality are examined,” claims the blurb on Bluewater’s website.

Jobs notoriously dislikes biographies. When the unauthorized “iCon: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business” was published by John Wiley & Sons, Jobs allegedly ordered every book by the publisher to be pulled from the shelves of Apple stores.

However, perhaps because of his recent brushes with mortality, Jobs recently authorized Walter Isaacson to write “iSteve: The Book of Jobs,” due to be published next year.

That book is eagerly anticipated, and is currently at ranked #4 in the business biographies section at Amazon.com.

This isn’t the first time Bluewater has published a graphic novel biography of a tech luminary. This year it profiled Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in comic form.

Other biographies by Bluewater include those of radio celebrity Howard Stern, comedienne Kathy Griffin, and Green Lantern star Ryan Reynolds.

The supporting cast in the comic book includes Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates, and the book shows Jobs at key events in his career, such as product launches.